Have handicapping contests peaked? NHC insiders say no
Las Vegas
Johnny Avello had not been to the National Horseplayers Championship in years. When he walked into the Bally’s Event Center for last summer’s renewal, he was impressed.
“This is nice,” he said. “This contest has gotten so big.”
A career bookmaker, Avello used to write the quintessential Kentucky Derby futures for Wynn Las Vegas. He is at heart a horseplayer. Three years after he moved across town to run the nationwide DraftKings Sportsbook, he remembered how small the NHC used to be.
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“It has really grown,” he said. “This is great. I didn’t realize it had grown so much.”
But has that growth plateaued?
“If it did plateau,” Steve Wolfson Jr. said, “as plateaus go, it’s a pretty good plateau.”
In 2003, when Wolfson won the fourth NHC, there were 213 entrants competing for $212,000 in cash prizes. His winner’s share was $100,000. The 23rd annual NHC, which reaches its climax Sunday, drew 643 entries vying for $2,309,550 in cash and a first prize of $725,000.
The cash pool reached a pre-COVID peak of $2,997,500 in 2020. That year the winner received $800,000, which actually was down from a 2012 high of $1 million.
“That year there was a great emphasis to say let’s try to build the momentum and the marketing of the event if we had a $1 million winner,” Wolfson said during a horseplayers roundtable on the Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “But then the drop to second, third, fourth was really severe.”
Now the prize money is spread out to reward one of every 10 players with at least $10,000 each and another 20 consolation-tournament competitors with no fewer than $1,000 apiece.
Even so, there were signs the momentum had slowed even before the pandemic. Year-over-year participation rose an average of 10 percent a year between 2001 and 2020, but the growth of the cash pool decelerated. The purse soared an average of 18 percent a year from 2004 to 2018. Then it went up a total of only 1 percent between 2018 and 2020. Since the pandemic hit the month after the 2020 NHC, the cash pool has dropped nearly 8 percent. It was a direct result of the lockdown that kept horseplayers and their tournaments away from racetracks.
| NHC | Champions | Entries | Change | 1st prize | Total prizes | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Steven Walker | 160 | | $100,000 | $212,000 | |
| 2001 | Judy Wagner | 204 | 27.5% | $100,000 | $212,000 | 0.0% |
| 2002 | Herman Miller | 177 | -13.2% | $100,000 | $212,000 | 0.0% |
| 2003 | Steve Wolfson Jr. | 213 | 20.3% | $100,000 | $212,000 | 0.0% |
| 2004 | Kent Meyer | 259 | 21.6% | $100,000 | $240,000 | 13.2% |
| 2005 | Jamie Michelson Jr. | 214 | -17.4% | $200,000 | $412,400 | 71.8% |
| 2006 | Ron Rippey | 226 | 5.6% | $250,000 | $536,000 | 30.0% |
| 2007 | Stanley Bavlish | 255 | 12.8% | $400,000 | $836,750 | 56.1% |
| 2008 | Richard Goodall | 277 | 8.6% | $500,000 | $1,017,700 | 21.6% |
| 2009 | John Conte | 302 | 9.0% | $500,000 | $962,000 | -5.5% |
| 2010 | Brian Troop | 302 | 0.0% | $500,000 | $947,850 | -1.5% |
| 2011 | John Doyle | 301 | -0.3% | $500,000 | $1,051,150 | 10.9% |
| 2012 | Michael Beychok | 480 | 59.5% | $1,000,000 | $1,507,003 | 43.4% |
| 2013 | Jim Benes | 455 | -5.2% | $750,000 | $1,500,000 | -0.5% |
| 2014 | Jose Arias | 500 | 9.9% | $750,000 | $1,590,000 | 6.0% |
| 2015 | John O'Neil | 606 | 21.2% | $800,000 | $2,363,000 | 48.6% |
| 2016 | Paul Matties Jr. | 629 | 3.8% | $800,000 | $2,778,760 | 17.6% |
| 2017 | Ray Arsenault | 654 | 4.0% | $800,000 | $2,385,000 | -14.2% |
| 2018 | Chris Littlemore | 702 | 7.3% | $800,000 | $2,974,700 | 24.7% |
| 2019 | Scott Coles | 668 | -4.8% | $800,000 | $2,863,000 | -3.8% |
| 2020 | Thomas Goldsmith | 694 | 3.9% | $800,000 | $2,997,500 | 4.7% |
| 2021 | Justin Mustari | 563 | -18.9% | $725,000 | $2,204,000 | -26.5% |
| 2022 | 643 | 14.2% | $725,000 | $2,309,550 | 4.8% |
“For a number of months there were virtually no on-track tournaments,” said chief operating officer Keith Chamblin of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, which has staged the NHC since it began in 2000. “Online play held up throughout the pandemic and was more popular than ever. Now we’re coming back to a time in 2021 when tracks were reopening, and there were other opportunities and options for tour members to qualify for the NHC.”
Frank Mustari, a 10-time NHC player whose son Justin won last year’s tournament, also disputed the notion that contest momentum has peaked.
“I see more weekend tournaments, either cash tournaments or online tournaments, than we ever had before,” Mustari said. “Now you can go on Xpressbet or whatever, and you can see they have a calendar for the next four or five months with a lot of cash tournaments.”
Even if statistics suggest a flattening of growth in recent years, Wolfson sounded confident it would be temporary, especially since grassroots expansion of handicapping tournaments never went away.
“If COVID and having fewer live tournaments stalls out what otherwise would be an upward trajectory,” Wolfson said, “the way Justin learned with his dad, and I learned with my dad and by going to the races is so much a part of that.”
Frank Mustari offered an even more personal story to show how tournaments and the sport itself may continue to grow.
“We were setting up our table there,” he said, pointing to where he and Justin would be playing in the NHC’s big venue, which used to be a jai-alai frontón. “Some guy from New York came up, introduced himself to Justin and said, ‘You’re the reason that I’m here this year.’ He followed Justin last year, and that’s the reason that he thought, ‘Hey, if this young kid can do this, I need to get involved in the contest world.’ And that’s what he did. It’s pretty cool. What he did last year is probably going to bring new players into the game, which we know we need.”
“It’s definitely a good feeling,” said Justin Mustari, 26, who last summer became the youngest champion in the NHC’s 22-year history. “That’s my goal as a young player, to try to get kids around my age into the game of horse racing.”
He conceded that racing must fight new forms of gambling, especially since sports wagering has spread to 30 states after the U.S. Supreme Court wiped out federal restrictions nearly four years ago.
“More people around my age are into sports betting right now, which is a big thing,” Justin Mustari said. “There’s a lot of money in that as well, but if we can get some of those younger eyes into the horse-racing game, there’d be a lot of fun.”
Jim Stirr, a second-time NHC player from Edmonton, said it has been especially difficult for him to play in American tournaments because of COVID restrictions in Canada.
“There was such a barrier for us coming to the U.S.,” Stirr said. “I didn’t play a whole lot thinking, if I did qualify last year, I might not be able to get into the U.S.”
That did not keep Stirr from lobbying executives at Century Mile, his home track, to put a toe in the water and consider staging their own handicapping contests as conduits to the NHC.
“I’ve pushed the management to have some on-track, qualifying tournaments,” he said. “Years ago our track at Northlands Park wasn’t doing anything with on-track tournaments. I know they do a lot at Woodbine (in Toronto), but in western Canada, it’s virtually none. At Assiniboia Downs in Winnipeg, they don’t do anything. Edmonton and Calgary, they don’t do a whole lot. In Vancouver, Hastings Park didn’t do a lot, either. I think it’s one of the best ways to get younger players, new blood, into the horse-racing industry.”
Despite the recent flattening of the growth curve, Chamblin said he is confident the momentum will return if some semblance of the pre-pandemic normal ever returns for good.
“We had a meeting with our partners at Caesars and talked about how we grow this event to make it even bigger and more successful,” Chamblin said. “We discussed ways to integrate with the World Series of Poker, which is going to take place in this very room in less than six months. What are the synergies? How can we cross-promote? How can we push horseplayers to the World Series of Poker, and how can we utilize that property, which is immensely successful, to help grow the NHC?”