Next weekend, Pimlico officials will be telling you to “Get your Preak on.” This weekend, we tell you to “Get your Pre-Preak on” with several valuable tourneys that will bridge the gap between Derby and Preakness and then some.
The Pre-Preak festivities begin with our popular Friday Pick & Pray.
After a recent purse bump, it’s worth up-to-$12,500 with $7,000 guaranteed. The entry fee is $190, and entries are capped at 75. Contest races are the 6th through 9th at Gulfstream; the 3rd, 5th and 6th from Santa Anita and the 7th through 9th from Belmont – 10 races in all.
If you like Friday’s tourney, you’ll love Saturday’s main event.
Saturday features our richest game of the weekend, an up-to-$30,000 live-format tourney for a buy-in of $260. Entries are limited to 133, but $20,000 is guaranteed to be awarded regardless of the number of sign-ups.
If you prefer treating online tourneys as a means to an end—to get yourself to rich, onsite tournaments, then you’ll want to check out our Saturday qualifiers for the Del Mar Handicapping Challenge (Pick & Pray) and the Monmouth Pick Your Prize tournament.
The Del Mar qualifier costs $400 to play and one entry per 25 earns a big $8,500 package for the July 28-29 event. The Monmouth play-in event costs just $117 per entry, but here again, one per 25 will advance with a $2,500 package to the Jersey Shore event on June 2.
Saturday’s 12 contest races are the 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th and 11th from Belmont (nice Saturday card there!), the 4th through 8th at Santa Anita, and the 10th and 11th from Monmouth where it will be Day 2 of their spring-summer meet.
Those same dozen contest races will comprise the handicapping challenge for Saturday’s pair of featured events at HorsePlayers.
You can win a seat at the NHC for $165. Or you could take a shot at the BCBC for $179. Or you could do both simultaneously—an especially simple (not easy…but simple) task this week since both are Pick & Prays. Have a really good day here and you can assure yourself quite an exciting fall and winter.
If you don’t succeed in your NHC/BCBC Saturday endeavors. Or if you prefer to play against fewer opponents, then feast your eyes on the Sunday co-features at HorsePlayers.
There’s an NHC “Super Qualifier” and a BCBC “Low Ratio” game. (I’m impressed with how we came up with two different names for essentially the same type of tournament!)
Anyway, one is for the NHC and has a one in 21 winning ratio. The other is for the BCBC and has a one in 23 ratio. Both offer at least one guaranteed prize. Both have entry fees of $500. And both are Pick & Prays. What could be a better gift for your mother than to proudly tell her, “I qualified for the NHC and BCBC today!”?
Of course, moms—at least my mom—can sometimes be fond of dispensing wise old sayings like “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” So maybe your mother would be more impressed if you won Sunday’s up-to-$20,000 game at HorseTourneys. It has $12,000 guaranteed.
Think of the nice buffet you could treat her to with that kind of money. (And since it won’t be Mother’s Day when you take her…since you’ll be busy playing tournaments all day this Sunday…crowds at the restaurants will be much smaller. She’ll thank you twice!)
There’s also a Sunday live-format qualifier for the Saratoga Challenge. Prize winners (one per each 25 entries) win $500 for travel plus entry fees to each of the single-day tourneys on Friday and Saturday, August 10-11. Their Friday challenge is called the Saratoga Challenge. Their Saturday challenge is called the Fourstardave Challenge. Confusing? Perhaps. We have just elected to call the two-day event the Saratoga Challenge. We find it clunky to refer to it as the Saratoga/Fourstardave Challenges. Just remember that if you win our Sunday qualifier, you’re covered for both days.
I think mom would agree that no Sunday (not even Mother’s Day) is complete without a weekly HorseTourneys Exacta contest. It’s an up-to-$5,000, live-format game with a $72 buy-in and $2,000 guaranteed. The goal is to pick three-horse $1 exacta boxes, and win as much as you can. And in these games, there are no price caps.
We, of course, are kidding about suggesting to mom that Mother’s Day should be all about HorseTourneys. We weren’t kidding about getting your “Pre-Preak” on this weekend, though, You can do that in a big way by playing one of the feeders for the May 19 (Preakness Day) up-to-$150,000 tourney. You can win your way in for as little as $37 all weekend long.
May you—and your mother—have a great weekend ahead.