This November 23-24, HorseTourneys will host the inaugural “Pick & Pray Classic”. It will serve as the fourth and final leg of the 2024 HorseTourneys Grand Slam, and will carry a guaranteed purse of $300,000. We want to get a good head start on this event, which is why we’re offering qualifying to it now, even before the Spa & Surf Showdown gets underway.
What’s most noteworthy about this event is that this will be the first time that our site has run a multi-day Pick & Pray tournament. All of the previous Tourney Triple or Grand Slam events have been multi-day affairs, but this will be the first multi-day tournament run under the Pick & Pray format.
Offering a multi-day Pick & Pray format been something that we’ve wanted to do for quite a while now. But as I’ve come to learn over the last 14 years (good heavens, has it really been that long?), what I might desire as an owner/operator, and what is easily accomplished, are often two different things. As I sometimes have to point out to those with similar wish lists for the site, web development is a time-consuming and costly endeavor, and we have to carefully choose our priorities. Fortunately, we were able to make the multi-day Pick & Pray format a reality in 2024.
I truly believe that this event could at some point (perhaps not this year) become our largest event of the year. “Bigger than the Spa & Surf Showdown?” you ask. “Bigger than Saratoga/Del Mar?”
Yeah, I really think so.
Here’s why:
If people ask me what I’ve been truly surprised about during the time we’ve operated HorseTourneys, one of a few things I’ll always mention is the players’ overwhelming preference for the Pick & Pray format.
Back in the day when I first got professionally involved in organizing online handicapping contests (back before even the year 2000), running a lockdown kind of format wasn’t something that I even recall us considering. I suppose that was because we saw the earliest online events as merely being online extensions of on-track tournaments, which, of course, allowed for selections to be made on a race-by-race basis.
Even today, some players accuse us of being biased toward the Pick & Pray format, but those are usually newer players who weren’t around for the evolution of the two formats in the early years of HorseTourneys.
When we first started, we only ran Live events. While I can’t recall exactly how long it took for us to introduce the Pick & Pray format, I reckon that it was at least a year, if not two, before we ran the first contest in which selections had to be made prior to first post. Since no one had done this previously online, we needed to come up with a novel name for it. I don’t know why, but “Pick & Pray” was what came to mind. You pick, and then you hope. Some thought it was silly, but in marketing, sometimes a little whimsy can work, so we decided what the heck, let’s go with it.
Little did I expect that the phrase would catch on as quickly as it did, and it has been the colloquial term for lockdown events over the last dozen years or so.
It did not take very long at all for the Pick & Pray format to establish itself, and within less than a year, it became quite clear that it was the preferred format. Little by little, demand steered our offerings that way. It would have been bad business for us not to move in that direction.
Of course, in hindsight, it really should have been obvious. Today, we know that players love the format for many reasons. They include:
- It fits into busy lifestyles – players can handicap beforehand, make selections and then go on with their busy days. Following along for hours is not required
- It creates a sense of “leveling the playing field” — many players have told us the Pick & Pray format creates a heightened sense of equity. It’s more populist, more democratic
- The leaderboard display, which transparently shows all player picks for every race (yes, we will always do it this way), is an interesting, engaging matrix in and of itself — the transparency it creates only adds to the aforementioned feelings of fairness and equity. There’s zero chance that curveballs can enter the equation, or that mysterious people are changing things behind the scenes
We could go on, but those three points capture the gist of the appeal.
But here’s the real rub: as the players have come to realize, and as the data bears out, one can participate in a Pick & Pray style of play, even in Live events, and still have confidence that they will perform as well as they would if they were playing the event race-by race.
If we analyze player scores across the board, the data proves that, on average, players perform marginally better in the Pick & Pray format than they do in the Live format. It’s a small but not insignificant difference.
What accounts for that? Well, lots of things. When playing Live, players probably get more conservative as they do better, and conversely, too risky when they’re doing poorly. Or perhaps changing odds and racing conditions have too much of an impact on decision-making. All of these variables drag the average performance in a live setting down below what it would have been if one had stuck with their original selections.
Of course, one isn’t going to participate in something like the NHC or BCBC on a Pick & Pray basis, but for someone who plays in hundreds or thousands of tournaments annually at HorseTourneys, it’s not difficult to understand why it has become, by miles, the preferred format. We haven’t run the numbers in awhile, but it’s easily 90 percent Pick & Pray versus 10 percent Live, not even considering feeder events (which we almost exclusively run under the P&P format).
We think that players are going to love the opportunity to play in an extended Pick & Pray event for a major prize pool. So, it’s with keen interest that we’ll see how this initial big event goes. To get players accustomed to the format, we’ll likely run some two-day Pick & Pray events in the near future. If it’s something that players like, we’ll certainly look at incorporating it on a regular basis.
We look forward to hosting you for our inaugural Pick & Pray Classic in November. Enjoy the rest of your summer, and as always, best of luck with your horseplaying.
McKay
President, HorseTourneys.com
