It’s the calm before the (Breeders’ Cup) storm…except that things won’t be very calm. We have six featured tourneys on Friday, seven on Saturday and another 13 on Sunday. A half dozen of those are BCBC qualifiers.
Speaking of the Breeders’ Cup, feeders continue for a host of single-day and two-day cash games and qualifiers pegged to racing’s championship weekend.
The above is just a fraction of BC feeders on the Friday schedule. Expect similar on Saturday and Sunday…and expect your first of six weekend chances to qualify for the BCBC to come your way on Friday.
It’s a $500 Low Ratio Pick & Pray at HorsePlayers. One of every 23 will earn a $10,000 entry for a week hence, and at least one grand prize is guaranteed.
Meanwhile there are five pretty solid games taking place on our side of the street Friday at HorseTourneys.
The busiest tourney of the weekend as far as entry count will likely be Friday’s $75 NHC Pick & Pray which guarantees two seats and also offers key NHC Tour points that can help you win a seat or a cash bonus. If you’re hunting points, this is a relatively cheap way to get them.
For cash gamers, there’s our $10,000 Guaranteed, No Limit Pick & Pray. Entries are $190 each.
Back on the qualifying front, we’ll be offering our first of three weekend play-ins to the $150,000 Guaranteed Flo-Cal Faceoff (January 9-10). Entries are $118 apiece, and one per 15 will advance to the first leg of the new 2021 Tourney Triple series…consisting of the Flo-Cal Faceoff, the Players Championship in April and the Spa & Surf Showdown in August. Tournament seats await the top three overall series performers, and if you win two of the three events, you earn a $1 million bonus. Win all three, and you pocket $2 million.
We’ll be on a Friday/Sunday qualifying schedule this week for Lone Star and Club Hawthorne.
The Lone Star play-in offers a $500 entry to its December 5th tournament to one of every 10 people who put up the $59 entry fee.
The Hawthorne OTBs qualifier costs $94 to play, and one of every 10 earns $800 in entry fees—good for each of the two single-day contests they’ll be running over Thanksgiving weekend.
The 10 Friday contest races are the 6th through 8th at Gulfstream Park West; the 5th through 9th from Belmont; and the 6th and 8th at Laurel—10 races in all.
Saturday is opening day of the Del Mar fall meet. That’s something to look forward to—as are the five featured tourneys we’ll be hosting that day.
A traditional, 2-seats-guaranteed NHC qualifier is set for Saturday. It’s a live-format tourney with an entry fee of $165.
The weekend’s richest competition is Saturday’s $25,000 Guaranteed, No Limit game. An entry fee of $260 gets you into this live-format event. Win this, and you’ll feel like you’re on a roll heading into Breeders’ Cup.
There’s also Saturday’s $10,000 Guaranteed Big Bucks Pick & Pray. This one costs $1,150 to play, and the field is limited to 20, unless there’s a rush of latecomers due to last-minute feeders. As always with Big Bucks events, payoffs go only to the top three finishers—divvied up on a 70%/20%/10% basis.
As promised, we’ll have another Flo-Cal Faceoff qualifier on Saturday. Like the Friday version, it’s a Pick & Pray with a ticket price of $118.
The $8 Pick 6 Jackpot keeps growing and growing. Saturday’s will start out at $27,922. That amount—plus whatever is generated on Saturday—will be won or shared by anyone who can go 6-for-6. (This would be a really nice Halloween haul.) Seventy percent of net entry fees get paid out via traditional win/place scoring totals while 30% gets directed to the Jackpot.
The Pick 6 Jackpot races on Saturday are the first 4 races at Del Mar; plus the 7th and 9th from Belmont. Across the six races, there are 41 betting interests prior to scratches. The entry deadline will be approximately 3:30 pm ET.
There are two Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge qualifiers on the Halloween slate at HorsePlayers.
Saturday’s “regular” BCBC qualifier has one grand prize guaranteed and carries an entry fee of $179. It’s a live-format tourney with a winning ratio of 1-per-65.
The winning ratio is just 1-per-11 in Saturday’s Super Low Ratio BCBC event. This one’s a Pick & Pray that also guarantees at least one winner (even if fewer than 11 show up). The entry fee here is $1,000.
The 12 Saturday contest races are: the 6th through 10th at Belmont; the 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th from Del Mar and the 8th through 10th at Woodbine.
The first day of November brings a BCBC tripleheader to HorsePlayers.
All three are live-format games guaranteeing at least one grand prize. Which entry fee/winning ratio you choose is up to you.
For $179, you can play in a game for which the winning ratio is 1-per-65.
Sunday’s $500 Low Ratio qualifier carries a built-in success rate of 1-in-23.
The winning ratio gets knocked down to 1-in-11 if you step up the entry fee to $1,000.
Here at HorseTourneys we have a nice mix on Sunday of six featured qualifiers and four featured cash games.
A brand-new qualifying opportunity comes in the form of a $236 live-format qualifier to the Del Mar Fall Challenge on November 28. One in 20 will win a $4,000 entry to this Del Mar online competition that will be held exclusively at TVG.com. (So you have to have a TVG account by November 28th in order to participate.)
On Sunday, you can also try for a $6,000 seat to the Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship. It requires a $384 entry fee to participate. One in 20 will win, and a $500 travel stipend for the January 23rd contest will also be awarded.
If you can’t wait until next year for some brick-and-mortar contest fun, there’s the November 27-28 Club Hawthorne OTB contests. These are run as two, separate, single-day competitions costing $400 each. Win Sunday’s $94 qualifier, and you’ll receive $800 in entry fees—good for both days.
Just a week after Hawthorne is the Lone Star NHC qualifier on December 5th. Entries are $59 apiece in this live-format play-in, and one in 10 will win a $500 entry for Texas.
There’s also an NHC qualifier on Sunday. It’s a Low Ratio Pick & Pray with a $500 entry fee and a winning ratio of 1-per-21. Note that 10 entries are required for this game to “go”.
The third Flo-Cal Faceoff qualifier of the weekend is Sunday. Again, it’s $118 to enter and one of every 15 will earn a $1,500 entry to the $150,000 Guaranteed first leg of the 2021 Tourney Triple. The format is Live.
Moving over to the cash side of the Sunday menu, there’s our $15,000 Guaranteed No Limit cash tourney. It’s a live-format affair this week with the usual entry fee of $195.
The Sunday Big Bucks tourney guarantees a purse of $7,500…and the pot for this Live-format game could reach $20,000 or even a little bit more depending on how many players show up. The entry fee is $1,150, and payoffs go strictly to the top three.
Our up-to-$5,000 Exacta tourney with $1,000 Guaranteed is always run in Live format. In this 12-race, multi-horse competition, the challenge is to come up with a three-horse exacta box in each race. Scores are tallied based on the cumulative $1 payoffs players amass over the 12 races. The entry fee is $125, and no payoff caps are in effect.
The second of the weekend’s two $8 Pick 6 Jackpot tourneys is also on the Sunday schedule. Check our Twitter feed on Saturday night or our home page on Sunday for an update on what the Jackpot will be. It depends on how many people take a swing at the Saturday Jackpot game (carryover: $27,922) and whether anyone hit it. As with the Exacta tourney, the Pick 6 Jackpot game is always played in live-format.
We leave you with a special advisory.
As some of you know, HorseTourneys President McKay Smith is a big Tampa Bay Rays fan. In the Rays’—and McKay’s—honor, we will now be referring to the act of getting off a winner as “pulling a Snell.” We hope you don’t have any Snells this weekend. Good luck!