Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Feb. 23, 2026

Jason discusses some racing from the weekend as well as the tournament scene and its community. 

A good Monday morning to you all! I know another cold front is hitting the Eastern United States, so I hope those of you who are getting hit hard by the weather are doing all right. I know when it gets cold here in Tampa, that usually means it’s really cold for everyone else. A big weekend is coming up including the Fountain of Youth (G2), the Rebel S. (G2), and the Gotham (G3), so we’ll be talking a lot about that on the podcast this week, which I’m looking forward to. 

This past weekend was on the quieter side in terms of Kentucky Derby (G1) and Oaks (G1) preps, although I did really enjoy taking in most of the card at Turfway Park on Saturday night via TwinSpires. Turfway sometimes gets maligned as being a bit of a chaos track, and I think there are some players that still don’t have a feel for synthetic surfaces. I think just having competitive and full fields will sometimes produce more random results, but as a player, I would think that could be potentially more appetizing. Oddly enough, other than the featured John Battaglia Memorial on Saturday, it was a very formful card with mostly lower priced horses winning. 

My buddy Kaitlin Benson tabbed the 15-1 winner of the Battaglia, Great White, who sat a very cozy trip in the race and held on for jockey Alex Achard. The favorite ended up running last after setting the pace but being headed at the five-sixteenths pole. 

For me, the highlight of the weekend was actually going on at Tampa on Friday and Saturday, and that was our Live it Up Challenge. It’s our biggest contest of the year, and as I’ve written before, I just love the contest community. To see horseplayers flying in to play the event and enjoy a couple of days at the races, it’s just awesome. I got to talk to a couple players before the event started, and one of the tough things about so much of our world being online now, we just don’t get to have those in-person talks about handicapping and betting like we used to. 

One thing TwinSpires has done really well, in my opinion, is to start working not only to cultivate tournaments, but to start giving spaces (literally and figuratively) for tournament players. Emily Gullikson, who as I’ve said many times, is one of the best handicappers and race watchers in the game today, has been hosting spaces on Twitter/X that focus on the tournaments, on strategy, on how players are betting, and lots more. They’re worth your time if it’s a part of racing you’re looking at getting into.

TwinSpires features small to medium tournaments daily and even the big Kentucky Derby Betting Challenge on the site once Derby season rolls around. Tournaments really are a cool part of the wagering ecosystem, and there’s so much to learn from all the great players in them. Not only does handicapping and betting strategy come into play just like the races, but now you bring in game theory to the equation, so it makes for a really fun experience. 

The other nice thing about the small tournaments is that they often take away the risk tolerance factor that is so important in the bigger tournaments. If you’re going to win the KDBC or the BCBC for that matter, you likely will have to make a decision to bet five figures or even more on a race at some point if you want to win. So many people just don’t have the bankroll or just the emotional risk tolerance to put that kind of money down on a horse race. So these smaller tournaments I think allow people to learn that strategy and play those kinds of tournaments, at a more reasonable and less scary figure. 

Hope to see you guys at the tournament tables soon!