Obviously the purse is the main attraction for this weekend’s 3rd annual Spa & Surf Showdown. Last year, Scott Fiedler of Babylon, N.Y. won $248,000 from a record online purse of over $644,000. This year’s purse has already exceeded the $342,000 mark with a few days of qualifying and the lion’s share of buy-ins (at $2,500 each) still to come.
However, the lucrative, all-cash purse is not the only draw for the two-day, full-card, Saratoga and Del Mar competition this Saturday and Sunday.
This year, we began the Tourney Triple Bonus…or to put it more accurately, bonuses. We offered a $2 million annuity bonus if someone could sweep the three events (no one will this year), and a $1 million annuity bonus to anyone taking two of the three series legs. Flo-Cal Faceoff champ Alan Levitt and Players Championship victor Dan Wilde are still very much alive for that windfall.
There’s more, though.
We also set up a points system for the Flo-Cal Faceoff, the Players Championship and the Spa & Surf Showdown whereby the top three points scorers across the Tourney Triple series would earn valuable seats to important contests in the future. This graphic explains everything more clearly than I can:
Okay, that brings us to “The List.”
Justin Wunderler and Ken Seeman are currently tied for 3rd-place with 165 points, A player cannot earn more than 100 points in a given event (because only your top score counts if you place two entries in the top 100). So that means that if you are within 100 points of Wunderler and Seeman, you made the above list…which means you are atill alive for a bonus that, at minimum, would mean a berth in next month’s The BIG One. And keep in mind that finishing 101st or worse in the Showdown means a score of 0 for that event, so those currently at the top of the leaderboard have assured themselves of absolutely nothing at this point given that there are already 155 entries signed on for the Spa & Surf Showdown with many more likely to come.
So you could have a great weekend and win the big money like Scott Fiedler did last year…
…or like NHC Hall of Famer Paul Shurman did in the inaugural Spa & Surf Showdown in 2019. (It remains Shurman’s biggest-ever monetary win as a contest player.)
And if you don’t have a great weekend, but you’re one of the 69 people on the continuum from Mattera to Stiles on the Tourney Triple list, you could have a pretty good weekend — or maybe even just an okay weekend — and still win a BCBC entry, an NHC seat or a berth in The BIG One.
Good luck to all. Maybe we’ll see yet another record-breaking Showdown.