It’s always a thrill to do well in a multi-player tournament – whether onsite or online. To succeed, your handicapping insights must be keen, and you probably need a fair dose of luck at one or more points in the competition. Sometimes you get one without the other and you wind up with nothing. You need it to be “your day”.
The problem is, it’s near impossible to know in advance when it’s going to be “your day”.
What a lot of HorseTourneys players are doing these days is to set things up where, if it IS their day, they will win more than just a single tourney prize.
This strategy is most easily executed when a weekend’s contests are conducted in the Pick & Pray format as ours were last weekend. Players can then enter a single set of picks in multiple tourneys. (You could certainly do the same in Live-format competitions as well, and it would largely play out the same way, save for late-game strategic decisions that might be made based on the standings.)
We saw this strategy used successfully on each day of the most recent Friday-Saturday-Sunday HorseTourneys weekend.
On Friday, William Roth comfortably captured the $2,500 top spot in our $5,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray with a score of $119.20.
He entered those same picks in our Horse Player World Series Entry-Only game and our Treasure Island NHC Last Chance qualifier that same day. He won the HPWS event and, while he didn’t finish first in the TI tourney, his $119.20 score easily put him within the winning zone for the NHC-eve contest entry.
Three tourneys, $330 in entry fees, one set of picks — $4,500 in cash and prizes. That’s not a double-dip…it’s a triple-dip!
The stakes were higher on Saturday, but the strategy – this time employed by Sean Nolan – was similar.
Nolan took the $7,000 top prize in our $15,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray, and copied and pasted his picks over to our first Wynn Handicapping Challenge Entry-Only qualifier and took the top spot (worth $2,000) in that one as well.
Two tourneys, $311 in entries, one set of selections — $9,000 in winnings.
On Sunday it was Craig Hom who was our most successful “multi-tabler”. He took the top spot in our Horse Player World Series Pick & Pray and finished second behind George Chute with the same selections in Sunday’s $7,500 Guaranteed event.
Such “multi-table” strategies come at a price, of course. If you enter the same set of picks in two tourneys and have a bad day, you lose double (assuming equal entry fees in both tourneys). But if you have a good day, you could effectively win 10, 20 or 30 times your entry fee twice with just the one set of picks. Or to look at it another way, you could knock off two or more of your year’s qualifying objectives in just one day.
We also had plenty of single-table success stories over the weekend. The most notable of those was that of Joel Wincowski, who became our first qualifier to the 2017 The Big One (Sept. 23-24 at Laurel Park). He wins his entry fees, plus travel and a three-night hotel stay to the event that offers 10 NHC seats, eight BCBC entries and 10 Horse Player World Series entries all to a field that is capped at 57.
Joel picked six winners from the last eight contest races to seal his victory in what was a sold-out qualifier. In his “day job”, Joel oversees enrollment at the University of Maine. It goes without saying that we were very pleased with the enrollment of this qualifier! The more who “matriculate”, the bigger our cash prizes will be at The BIG One (and you can stay abreast of how this is shaping up all year long on the special The BIG One pages at HorseTourneys.com)
Joel played in the 2016 The BIG One and didn’t fare all that well. But he seemed to have a very enjoyable weekend, accompanied by his wife and son. It was heartwarming to see how many players brought family members to Laurel with them last September and we look forward to seeing the Wincowskis again next year. We hope all can make it, Joel!
Last year’s The BIG One champion, Dan Flanigan, finished behind Wincowski, but he didn’t exit the weekend empty handed. He and nine others all won entries on Sunday to the Treasure Island NHC Last Chance tourney on Jan. 26.
We’ll have more opportunities to qualify next weekend for The BIG One, the Horse Player World Series, the Wynn Handicapping Challenge and more. And on Sunday you’ll have a first-chance to win an all-inclusive package (including $20,000 Entry Fee) to the Kentucky Derby Betting Challenge.
Good luck whichever one you choose. Or perhaps – following the exploits of Roth, Nolan and Hom – I should say whichever “ONES” you choose.