On a weekend with predominantly live-format featured tourneys, there were no double winners. So the “wealth” was very nicely spread during a three-day period that began with a newly-enriched Friday contest.
The up-to-$10,000 Friday Pick & Pray with $6,000 guaranteed is no more. Thanks to you, it’s now an up-to-$12,500 Pick & Pray with $7,000 guaranteed. Greg Gass undoubtedly appreciates the purse bump more than anyone so far. He earned the top prize of $6,221 for his three winners and two places that included 8-1 shot Jay Makes Us Laugh (Leno? Mohr? North?) in the 6th at Santa Anita.
Similar to Gass in the $12,500 tourney, a score in the 80s was pretty potent in Friday’s $75 NHC qualifier at HorsePlayers.
David Porco, Matthew Rentze and Denis McCormick are the three with the chance to parlay their $75 Friday investment into $800,000 or so at the NHC next year. Rentze hit the last two races to sneak into the “number.”
Moving to Saturday’s action…it’s been quite an April for Adam Thoutt.
On April 7, he won $24,633 in our up-to-$75,000 tourney. This past Saturday, he was at Treasure Island and finished sixth in their Wager to Win tourney. With spots going to the top nine finishers, it was time well spent for Thoutt. One of his best moves at Treasure Island, however, was his decision to enter our Saturday Del Mar Handicapping Challenge qualifier (the first of 2018).
Thoutt had 3 wins, including Susie Bee ($32.00, $16.00) in the 11th at Gulfstream. We’re going to guess he had that at TI as well. Then he hit place horses in the final two races of our tourney to seal his win and the $8,500 Del Mar package that went with it.
We’re glad he took the time to play HorseTourneys while obviously busy with the goings on at Treasure Island. I guess you could say that Adam won his Del Mar package “on second Thoutt.”
Joe Johnson—always deadly from three-point land…or in any HorseTourneys event—was the big winner in Saturday’s $20,000 Guaranteed contest that finished up with a pot of $23,010.
Johnson prevailed by 80 cents to earn the grand prize of $10,354. Close behind was Tim Gasaway ($4,602).
There were two prizes awarded in Saturday’s qualifier to the Monmouth Pick Your Prize event.
Louis Filoso led the way with five winners and one runner up. He will be joined at Monmouth on June 2 by Tim Darnell who closed like Zenyatta, registering four of his six winners in the final four races of the competition.
The high featured-contest score on Saturday was recorded over at HorsePlayers.
High scores of the day are seldom found at Super Qualifiers (or Low Ratio events) due to the higher entry fees which result in smaller fields. But don’t tell that to Robert Wada, whose $109.90 score got him his ticket punched to the NHC.
Also scoring in triple figures on Saturday was Tanya Taylor.
Taylor, who won a $75,000 game at HorseTourneys in 2017, annexed a BCBC qualifier on Saturday. That will send the Arkansas native on to racing’s biggest weekend with a nice $10,000 entry (including a $7,500 betting bankroll).
Sunday was one of those days when there were a lot of big-priced winners among the 12 contest races. Four of the twelve win mutuels were $119.40, $80.00, $59.50 and $45.00. You didn’t need to have all four to finish on top, but it was important to have at least a couple.
Richard Grose did just that in Sunday’s $12,000 Guaranteed tourney that ended up with a pot of $18,292. The Missouri native had two winners—including $119.40 winner Finbar in the 9th at Laurel—plus two places to grab the top money of $8,231.
Tom Dillon and Rick Vasquez (third behind Grose in the $18,000 game) did likewise.
They each had two of the four bombs to earn $3,500 packages to August’s Saratoga Challenge.
As happens more often than one would expect, the highest Sunday score came in the least expensive featured tourney.
Congratulations to Charles Nelson, who was leading the life of Reilly by racking up a gaudy score of $184.30 that easily won him a spot in next Sunday’s Steve Sexton Mile Day Challenge at Lone Star Park. Nelson will be joined there by Shawn Lechner, Michael Bailey and Don Allen.
Over at HorsePlayers, Doug Drewry had five winners…
…including Flat Bill ($59.50) in Belmont’s 9th and Sansava ($45.00) in Laurel’s 11th to win an NHC seat along with Sarah Wiener, whose requisite two cappers were Sansava and Quai Voltaire ($80.00 to win in Belmont’s 7th).
In Sunday’s BCBC Low Ratio tourney, it was Finbar and Flat Bill…
…that propelled Ronald Peltz to victory and a $10,000 entry. You may recall that, eight days earlier, Peltz won an NHC seat in the free tourney at HorsePlayers by picking the #5 horse in every race where the five horse didn’t scratch.
In the BCBC qualifier, Peltz played things straight, using a sequence of numbers that not even a Russian spy could decode. He did pick a couple of number 5s—including 58-1 winner Finbar at Laurel—but he might have done even better using a couple of more fives…like 39-1 shot Quai Voltaire.
Fives certainly seem to be on a roll of late. Perhaps that bodes well for whichever horse draws the five hole in the Kentucky Derby.
No matter how you pick your winners, we hope you have plenty of them in the week ahead. Thanks for being a part of another fun weekend at HorseTourneys.