We’ve often amused ourselves in recent years referring to Eric Boyd as Eric “B Connected” Boyd in a nod to the name of the Boyd Gaming players card utilized at The Orleans. However, we now feel compelled to officially change his HorseTourneys nickname to Eric “Skeet” Boyd.
Why?
Because that is his actual nickname…and it has been such for a very long time.
“My sister started calling me that when I was just a little baby,” the now 54-year-old Boyd laughed. “She thought I looked like a mosquito. It kinda stuck.”
Boyd made HorseTourneys history in 2024—not because he won the HorseTourneys Tour, but because he recorded nine separate tourney victories in the process of doing so. His nine wins were three more than the previous mark set by Travis Pearson in 2022.
Boyd’s year-end score of 102.484 points was also a record, eclipsing Pearson’s 2022 tally of 99.796–a score that both 2022 HT Tour winner Jorge Cruz-Aedo and Pearson, himself, exceeded this year in finishing second and third, respectively, behind Boyd..
What was Boyd’s secret?
“I played all of them like they were Pick & Prays,” he said.
Actually that playing style was more of a necessity than a preference for Boyd, who lives with his wife Connie Jo in Fort Davis, Texas—about 100 miles from the Mexico border in West Texas.
“I really don’t have time to play them any other way,” he said. “We have a little farm here with cows, horses and 50 or 60 goats. I’m lucky if I see two or three of the races in a contest during the day.”
It’s not just the animals that keeps Boyd busy. He also owns a construction company—and he’s the pastor of the non-denominational Church In The Mountains in Fort Davis. That’s where Boyd conduct morning services on Sunday and Bible study on Wednesday nights.
Clearly, Boyd is bringing new meaning to the phrase “Pick & Pray”—and it’s working. Perhaps the first truly encouraging signs came in 2023, when he finished 13th behind Ed Peters in the HorseTourneys Tour.
“I have software I’ve been working on, and early last year, Brett Wiener, who has been my role model for a long time, asked if I was going to take it public. I told him I thought I need to make a ‘fashion statement’ first. I was thinking maybe a Top 10 finish in the Tour would be good. He said, ‘Why don’t you just win the Tour?’
“I chuckled and said, ‘Okay.’”
Little did he know.
Halfway through 2024, Boyd earned a $1,000 bonus for being in third place at the mid-year mark.
“Early in the year, I was in the lead, but a couple of guys passed me,” Boyd recalled. My method kept putting me right there, though, and I got the lead back and I said to myself, ‘This could happen!’
“The last month or two of the year, I spent a lot of time sweating. Cruz [Jorge Cruz-Aedo] was really close…but it worked.
Indeed, it did.
Boyd earned a $20,000 bonus for his Tour victory plus paid entries into each of the “major” tourneys on the 2025 HorseTourneys schedule.
What’s Boyd planning to do for an encore?
“Do it again!” he laughed.
Whether he can repeat remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that Boyd, pictured above with his trusted companion Otto B Dog (“He’s with me every day, win or lose.”), will be playing again.
“I’ve never not handicapped,” he said. “When I was 10, I lived in Rapid City, S.D., and my dad owned and trained racehorses that ran in Rapid City and also in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the bushes. I think some of the races were sanctioned. My dad would give me $10 that would have to last me through the weekend, and I had my brother place bets for me. He was 16, which was old enough.
“I did get away from betting for a long time, though,” Boyd rememberd. “Then when we started getting better phones and Internet, I realized, ‘I can start betting on horses again.”
About nine years ago, Boyd won the second tournament he ever played in—an online NHC credit builder—and shortly thereafter, he won an NHC seat. Unfortunately, through no fault of the NTRA, Boyd could never enjoy any of his three appearances in Vegas.
“It’s hard for me to get away from the farm and the church and go out there,” he said. “I always ended up in the middle of the pack. The last time I was there [2023], I was on the phone the whole time with people back home trying to keep the farm going.”
Boyd’s depiction of the demands of his farm is no tall tale. His phone interview was the first I’ve ever conducted with someone who said he was bedding down goats while we spoke . And I heard the high-pitched bleats to prove it.
“One of these goats is about an hour old,” Boyd said in between questions.
After the chores are done, though, Boyd allows himself to spend time on the horses and his software. He looks at the results from up to 120 races every night from only those tracks that HorseTourneys uses in contests. Then he types notes (“I’m a one-finger typer so it can take a while”) on any horses he feels have shown some measure of notable ability. Then, once the feature-tourney races have been announced, he reviews his notes for any positive comments he made on horses that have been entered.
“Basically pace and price is all I pay attention to,” he said. “I despise chalks. 4-1 is about the bottom for me. If I bet a longshot, and the favorite wins, I can always tell myself, ‘Well, the better horse won.’ A chalk is worth about eight points in a contest, and that can be made up. But if I bet a chalk and a longshot wins, I’m gonna be butt hurt. I’m not going to take that well.”
We know by now that Skeet and Connie Jo (and Otto B Dog) don’t have time to take road trips to racetracks. And betting through an ADW isn’t an option for a Texas resident either. That leaves contest play and HorseTourneys and the friends Boyd has made along the way.
For example, he is an avid member of the “Live and Breathe Horse Racing” group on Facebook.
“Gabriel Vartanian is good for horse racing,” Boyd said. “He does a great job with that group.”
Of course, it takes one to know one. And in 2025, Eric “Skeet” Boyd” hopes to again lead three pretty impressive flocks of his own: One in a church, one on a farm, and the other on the HorseTourneys Tour leaderboard.
