Featured-tourney prize winners were well spread out last weekend. No one won two top prizes. However one player—Christopher Dewey—won three.
Dewey’s big weekend began innocently enough on Saturday with an under-the-radar second-place finish in our Gold Coast Summer Classic qualifier that earned him a $1,000 package.
If anything, the Gold Coast qualifier was notable for the big performance turned in by winner Tony Marzolla. On a day when low prices were the norm, Marzolla was on fire.
His score would have won virtually any tourney he had chosen to play that day.
Fortunately for the rest of the active HorseTourneys players on Saturday, Marzolla limited himself to the Gold Coast qualifier. That left Mark Aylward, with three wins and four places…
…to capture the $12,500 top prize in Saturday’s $25,000 Guaranteed Pick & Pray.
James Michelson, proud father of 2005 NHC Champ Jamie Michelson, won Saturday’s NHC qualifier by a dime.
Though with two NHC seats at stake, things weren’t quite as tight as the scoreboard might have suggested. Terrance Bushart will join Michelson next February at Treasure Island thanks to his strong second-place finish.
Another big Saturday winner was Bernard Reilly who prevailed over at HorsePlayers in the Guaranteed Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge qualifier.
Thanks to solid participation, HorsePlayers was also able to award partial, $2,500 BCBC entries to Anthony Mattera and David Nelson.
A day earlier, the affable Joe Koury scored a nice victory in Friday’s $7,500 Gtd. Event.
Joe caught a runner up in the contest finale that paid $7.10 to place, and that was the difference in his collecting a $3,750 top prize rather than second money.
At HorsePlayers on Friday, a special, two-seat $50 NHC qualifier was hosted.
Normally, Matt Kasowicz and Patrick Runyan would have been the big winners. But we have gotten to the point in the year when NHC double-qualifiers are beginning to show up in the leaderboards and Runyan was in that category. As a result, the second NHC seat fell to third-place finisher David “Trey” Stiles who will be making his 16th consecutive NHC appearance next February. Now that’s consistency!
Fast forwarding ahead to Sunday—it turned out to be a day when Christopher Dewey picked up where he had left off on Saturday.
Dewey’s total of $81.90 placed him at the top of the heap in our Guaranteed Del Mar qualifier where strong participation also allowed us to award a second $7,500 package to runner up Tony Zhou.
Dewey and Zhou both now become instantly eligible for a $10,000 HorseTourneys site credit bonus (payable over six months) should they finish first on July 28-29 at Del Mar.
Dewey also took part in our first 2017 qualifier for the Saratoga Challenge. It was a well-attended contest and his same score of $81.90 only got him fourth place in this event…
…but that was good enough to earn him the fourth of four Saratoga packages ($1,000 entries for each of the two single-day tournaments on August 9-10 plus $750 travel). Counting the $1,000 Gold Coast package and the $7,500 Del Mar package, Dewey accounted for brick-and-mortar tourney entries totaling $9,500 and travel stipends worth $1,750.
And we certainly would be remiss if we didn’t pay tribute to the three who bested Dewey and won Saratoga packages of their own on Sunday: Jeffrey Adami, James Timinck and Kevin Cox.
There were other big tourneys on Sunday. Ronald Peltz and Anthony Robb became the weekend’s 5th and 6th qualifiers to the NHC…
…thanks to their 1-2 finish at HorsePlayers.
The day’s $10,000 Guaranteed game at HorseTourneys had an interesting result.
Gary Blair earned the first-place prize of $5,000 despite picking just one winner and two runners up from 12 races. As you might have guessed, though, Blair sniffed out the prices. His winner and one of his place horses were max-payoff horses, accounting for $86.00 of his total right there in two fell swoops. (I’m not sure that fell swoops come in numbers greater than one, but we like to break down barriers here at HorseTourneys.)
Another fascinating competition was our Sunday qualifier to The BIG One.
Jon Hurd and Vic Stauffer (winner of a Del Mar package a week earlier) were the two who earned all-inclusive packages to the high-expectation event at Laurel on September 23-24. Their winning scores–$51.30 and $50.60, respectively—were far from gaudy. In fact, they barely showed flat-bet profits.
But for Hurd, in particular, the victory in The BIG One qualifier showcased an impressive handicapping achievement. Here’s how his scoresheet looked after 7 of the tourney’s 11 races.
And here’s how it looked at the finish.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
Our newly-enriched $2,000 Guaranteed Sunday Exacta tourney IS over, though. That’s because we raised the purse yet again, making it now worth $2,500 Guaranteed.
The first beneficiary of the latest purse increase was Gary Rorrer who registered five three-horse exacta box wins, including the first four right out of the gate. Next Sunday? You guessed it! $3,000 Guaranteed!
Congratulations also go out to Michael Lynch, Jr. who won the first Hawthorne Summer NHC qualifier of the year on Sunday; to Daniel Kaplan, who won our last-chance Surfside qualifier; and to Brian Johnson, Anthony DeCaspers and George Chute—each of whom won $2,000 entries on Sunday to the August 4-5 Wynn Handicapping Challenge. Remember that we offer Wynn (and guaranteed Del Mar) qualifiers each weekend. So we’ll have more direct qualifiers to both this coming weekend. No need to take a week off here at HorseTourneys!
We’ll also be back with qualifiers to Saratoga, The BIG One, Woodbine Mile, Monmouth and, for the first time, to the Pegasus World Cup (January 26-27). Of course, there will also be our usual assortment of cash games including that Exacta tourney with its third increased purse in three weeks.
We hope you can join us for some of the action. And we thank you for being a part of last week’s fun. Have a great week ahead.