Two weeks ago, Ezra Garrett won $30,000 by breaking the $8 Pick 6 Jackpot ice that had remained frozen for 19 months. This weekend, we begin a new Jackpot game, a $15 Pick 4 tourney, that we hope will not be quite as hard to hit. That one begins on Saturday. On Sunday, you can become the very first person to qualify for the 2021 Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge.
What about Friday? Well, as per usual, that’s when the weekend featured-tourney fun springs into action.
Cash-game specialists will want to focus on Friday’s $10,000 Guaranteed No Limit Pick & Pray. The entry fee is $260, and there is no limit as to how high the purse could grow—but it won’t be less than $10,000.
Two qualifiers will be offered on both Friday and Sunday. One is a $106 play-in to the Club Hawthorne OTBs tournaments (two single-day events) that take place in greater Chicago on November 27th and 28th. If you show up on the day of the contests, it would cost you $400 to play on Friday and $500 on Saturday. If you win our 1-per-10 qualifier on Friday, you’ll earn $900 in Club Hawthorne entry fees—enough for both days.
Also on a Friday/Sunday schedule this weekend are our qualifiers to the December 5th Lone Star Park NHC contest. Friday’s Pick & Pray play-in requires an entry fee of just $59, and one of every 10 entrants will pick up a $500 pass for the Texas showdown.
Friday is the first of three consecutive days this weekend in which you can compete for a $1,500 berth to the $150,000 Guaranteed Flo-Cal Faceoff here on January 9-10. The Faceoff is a two-day contest consisting of mandatory full-card plays on both Gulfstream (Flo) and Santa Anita (Cal). It’s an all-cash competition that also serves as the first leg in the new 2021 “Tourney Triple” that later includes April’s Players Championship and August’s Spa & Surf Showdown. The top three overall finishers receive important contest seats as a free bonus. Win two out of the three Tourney Triple legs and your bonus explodes up to $1 million. A clean sweep of the three gets you $2 million.
The entry fee for each Flo-Cal Faceoff qualifier this weekend is $118, and the winning ratio in each case is 1-per-15. We start things off on Friday with a Pick & Pray.
On Friday, HorsePlayers is the venue for what figures to be our most popular event of the weekend.
It’s a $75 NHC qualifier with two spots assured and lots of NHC Tour points up for grabs. Accumulate enough Tour points and you can win an NHC seat even if you didn’t qualify in a qualifier. Or your points could net you some very worthwhile cash bonuses. See NTRA.com for all the details.
Contest races for all of the featured games at HorseTourneys and HorsePlayers are the 7th and 9th at Aqueduct; the 8th and 9th from Laurel; and the 2nd through 7th at Del Mar—10 in all.
On Saturday, we welcome the aforementioned $15 Jackpot Pick 4 tourney into the mix.
The Jackpot Pick 4 works similarly to the Jackpot Pick 6 in that 70% on the net pool in each tourney gets paid out to players via the traditional $2.00 win/place scoring system. The other 30% gets directed to the Jackpot pool. There is a maximum of three entries per account.
To get things started, we’ve seeded the Jackpot with $1,000. So if you have a 4-for-4 ticket, you’ll win or share the $1,000…plus any additional Jackpot money generated…plus whatever you win via the traditional win/place payouts (the 70% referenced earlier). In a departure from the old Pick 6 Jackpot games, we’ll be running these—at least initially—as Pick & Prays.
The four Jackpot Pick 4 races are: races 9-10 at the Big A and races 3-4 from Del Mar. The whole thing should take about an hour and 15 minutes.
Two of our popular Saturday cash tourneys are back on Saturday after taking a week off for Breeders’ Cup.
The richest event of the weekend is Saturday’s $25,000 Guaranteed, Live-format cash game. It’s $260 to play.
For the heavy hitters out there, there’s our up-to-$20,000 Big Bucks Pick & Pray with $10,000 Guaranteed. The entry fee is not cheap—$1,150. However, entries are limited to 20 (unless we get a late arrival or two via last-minute feeders), and payouts go only to the top three on a 70/20/10 percent basis. If we reach 20 entrants, the pot will exceed $20,000. It’s a great game if you like to play serious money but not against a humongous-sized field.
There’s also another $118 Flo-Cal Faceoff qualifier on Saturday, of course. Again, one of every 15 entries will receive a $1,500 place in the starting gate for the big 2-day cash event here on January 9-10.
Contest races for our 12-race features on Saturday are the 8th through 10th at Aqueduct; the 7th and 8th from Laurel; the 2nd through 4th at Del Mar; and the 7th through 10th north of the border at Woodbine.
The ink is not yet dry on the results charts for last weekend’s Breeders’ Cup. On Sunday at HorsePlayers, however, you can be the first to secure a paid-up entry to NEXT year’s Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge.
If you win Sunday’s $500 Low Ratio BCBC qualifier, you’ll have something to look forward to for an entire year. It’s a 1-per-23 Pick & Pray and, not incidentally, one grand prize ( a $10,000 entry) is guaranteed, even if fewer than 23 sign up.
You’ll have something to look forward to for nine months if you win Sunday’s NHC qualifier. It’s a “regular,” $165 play-in with two “Bally’s Berths” guaranteed and a winning ratio of 1-per-65.
Nine more featured events come your way Sunday here at HorseTourneys.
As noted earlier, there will be qualifiers (all in Live format) to the Flo-Cal Faceoff ($118 entry fee), the Club Hawthorne OTBs qualifier ($109) and the Lone Star Park NHC contest ($59).
You can also win a fat $6,000 entry (plus an additional $500 for travel) in our $384 qualifier to the Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship on January 23rd. You can play the PWCBC from Gulfstream or Xpressbet. The winning ratio for Sunday’s live-format qualifier is 1-per-20.
Another high-end contest seat is on the line in Sunday’s qualifier to the Del Mar Fall Challenge—to be hosted exclusively at TVG.com on November 28th. One of every 20 entries in this live-format play-in receive a $4,000 entry for the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Cash gamers have four Sunday features to pick from.
There’s our $15,000 Guaranteed No Limit tourney. It’s a live-format affair this week, and the entry fee is the customary $195.
The Sunday Big Bucks game guarantees $7,500 in the pot and, again, it could reach $20,000 in value if we sell it out. It costs $1,150 to participate and payouts go only to the top three.
Another Live-format competition is Sunday’s up-to-$5,000 Exacta tourney with $1,000 Guaranteed. You make a three-horse exacta box for each race, and whoever compiles the most money (based on $1.00 payoffs with no price caps in effect) wins. These $125 games are a fun opportunity in which to exercise a different handicapping “muscle.”
For $15 per entry (three-entry maximum), you can take a swing at the Sunday edition of the Pick 4 Jackpot tourney. Check our Twitter feed on Saturday night for the Jackpot amount. It will depend on how many took part in Saturday’s Pick 4 Jackpot tourney—and whether anyone hit it.
There you have it—20 featured tourneys to serve as an encore to Breeders’ Cup weekend. We hope you find them to be the source of both fun…and profits. Good luck!