We don’t believe in Breeders’ Cup hangovers here at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers. Energized by an exciting Breeders’ Cup, we offer a strong menu of 19 featured events, including several lucrative cash games to go along with direct qualifiers to a slew of top-notch onsite tournaments. The weekend action kicks off on Friday.
The Friday feature at HorseTourneys is an up-to-$12,500 Pick & Pray with $5,000 Guaranteed. The buy-in is $190 and there is a limit of 75 entries.
You’ll see that the majority of our featured events this weekend are of the Pick & Pray variety, and so it is at HorsePlayers on Friday.
There are a total of seven guaranteed NHC berths up for grabs at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers this weekend. The first two of those seven are at stake in Friday’s $75 NHC Pick & Pray qualifier at HorsePlayers. One per 143 entries will be headed to Treasure Island, and if we get up to the 429-entry mark, a third seat will be added.
Contest races for the two Friday featured tourneys are the 6th through 9th from Gulfstream Park West; the 6th, 7th and 9th from Woodbine; and the 5th through 7th from Del Mar, where it will be opening day of their fall meeting—that’s 10 races in all.
Five more featured tourneys come your way on Saturday, including a last-chance opportunity.
You can win a $10,000 BCBC entry for $179 in our “regular” Pick & Pray. One seat is guaranteed and the winning ratio is 1 in 65.
Want to increase your odds of success? You can try your luck in our $1,000 BCBC Pick & Pray. One $10,000 prize/entry is guaranteed here as well, and the winning ratio here is just 1 in 11.
Still too chancy for your liking? You can improve your odds further in our Elite BCBC qualifier. Here, the buy-in is $2,300. It, too, is a Pick & Pray with one entry guaranteed, and the winning ratio here is a relatively tiny 1 in 5.
There are four very good events at HorseTourneys as well on Saturday.
The Last Chance qualifier is that for the November 17 Aqueduct Challenge, where players will compete for cash, NHC seats and a Belmont Stakes Betting Challenge entry. The entry fee for Saturday’s qualifier is $78 and one in 15 will earn a $500 entry to the Big A plus $500 for travel.
Our richest tourney of the weekend comes in the form of Saturday’s up-to-$30,000 Pick & Pray with $17,500 guaranteed. The entry fee here is $260 and up to (but no more than) 133 entries will be accepted.
Guaranteed seats three and four to the NHC this weekend are on offer in Saturday’s “regular” NHC Pick & Pray. One in 65 entries, at $165 per entry, will punch his or her ticket to Las Vegas.
Fast becoming one of our most popular weekend offerings is our full-package qualifier to next March’s Horse Player World Series. Saturday’s Pick & Pray tourney offers one $1,500 HPWS entry, a four-night hotel stay at The Orleans, and another $500 for your travel expenses per each 25 entries. This one costs $117 to play.
Over at HorsePlayers, there’s an NHC qualifier well suited to those who wish to increase their chances of landing a seat.
It’s a Low Ratio Pick & Pray with one seat guaranteed and a winning ratio of just one in 21. You can reserve a spot in this event for $500.
Contest races for all of the featured Saturday tourneys at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers are the 7th through 9th at Aqueduct; the 7th through 10th races at Laurel; the 8th through 10th from Gulfstream Park West; and the 3rd and 6th at Del Mar—That makes 12 races in all, and eight of them are stakes, including all four contest races from Laurel.
On Sunday, we’ll push the pedal to the metal with 12 featured tourneys, including a very lucrative first-chance qualifier.
If you thought the BCBC was a high-stakes game, take a look at the Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship at Gulfstream on January 25-26. Players start with a $12,000 bankroll (which also represents the buy-in…the prize pool, guaranteed at a minimum of $435,000, is funded by players’ churn, plus contributions from The Stronach Group, Gulfstream Park and Xpressbet). Our Sunday qualifier costs $480 to enter and one in 30 will earn a Pegasus entry ($12,000 value as noted earlier) plus $500 for travel. Pegasus contestants will have seats in The Sport of Kings Theatre for Pegasus Day, and five NHC seats will be part of that prize pool as well as all that cash. Note that this qualifier will be run in live-format mode.
There’s another Gulfstream Park-hosted tournament on the Sunday qualifying schedule. It’s the Gulfstream Park Conquer the Crown tournament on December 1. The “Crown” refers the Claiming Crown—an event that annually brings together a high number of large, evenly-matched, fields of some of the best claiming horses in the country. Winners of this entry-only game get their $3,000 buy-in covered on December 1.
You can also try to play your way into the November 23-24 Hawthorne Fall NHC Super Qualifier on the weekend after Thanksgiving. The event is run as two separate, single-day tourneys, each one with a $400 buy-in. Our Sunday Pick & Pray for this event awards $800 in entry fees (good for both days) plus another $500 for your travel.
On the weekend after Hawthorne, Texas takes center stage with the Lone Star Park NHC qualifier on December 1. One in 10 in this Sunday Pick & Pray will receive a $500 entry to it. The buy-in here is just $59.
I believe the final brick-and-mortar NHC qualifier of the calendar year is the December 29 Monmouth Last Chance NHC qualifier. Winners in our Sunday Pick & Pray qualifier (one per each 15 entries at $71 per entry) earn a $400 entry and $500 for travel to the Jersey Shore…where the adjacent Atlantic Ocean may be frozen at that time. It will be warm inside Monmouth Park, though.
It’s always warm inside The Orleans unless they have the air conditioners turned up too high. The Orleans, of course, plays host to the Horse Player World Series, and you can win a $1,500 to the important March event by playing in our entry-only qualifier on Sunday for $90. One in 20 in this Pick & Pray will win.
Three cash games are on the Sunday featured schedule at HorseTourneys, including a pair with $10,000 guarantees.
One of those $10,000 Guaranteed events is our Big Bucks tourney, where a maximum of 20 entries compete for a total purse of at least $10,000 and as much as $20,000. The entry fee is $1,150 for this one, which is always run in Pick & Pray mode. Prize money is paid just to the top three finishers (on a 70/20/10 percent basis).
There’s also a more traditional up-to-$20,000 Sunday Pick & Pray with an entry fee of $195. This is also a $10,000-guaranteed event…just with more players and a deeper payout schedule. Total entries are limited to 118.
No Sunday is complete, of course, without our up-to-$5,000 Exacta box tourney (always live-format). In these games, players select a three-horse exacta box in each race, and the winner is based on cumulative $1 exacta payoffs on the 12 contest races (with no payoff caps). This tourney offers a guaranteed pot of at least $1,000.
There are three featured events on Sunday over at HorsePlayers—all with a distinct, NHC flavor, and all to be run in live format.
One is a “regular” NHC direct qualifier with a buy in of $165. This is traditionally a good weekend to try and qualify to the NHC with some of the regular players opting for a “breather” after the BCBC.
There are also a pair of $118 qualifiers to onsite NHC super qualifiers held at the end of the 2018 NHC Tour year. One is to the December 22 event at Fair Grounds and the other to the January 5 contest at Santa Anita. One entry per 20 in these HorsePlayers qualifiers will earn a $1,500 entry plus $500 for travel to Fair Grounds or Santa Anita as the case may be.
We wish good luck to all of you this weekend—especially Brendan Fay and Brett Wiener who will be representing us as HorseTourneys qualifiers at this weekend’s Del Mar Fall Classic. The Breeders’ Cup may be over, but the winnings—and fun—continue non-stop here at HorseTourneys and at live contest sites nationwide. Wherever you participate from, we wish you an enjoyable weekend.