Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem for Nov. 6, 2025

A good Thursday morning to you all! Putting the final bows on our post Breeders’ Cup coverage here and wanted to talk a little bit about the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge (BCBC). It’s my favorite tournament each year to follow along with and thankfully the Breeders’ Cup now shows each player's plays immediately following each race going official. We also had some coverage on site from Peter Fornatale of In the Money Media, who I had on my show Wednesday to talk about the tournament. 

First of all big congrats to Dave Smyth who won by turning his $7,500 bankroll into more than $140,000! It’s such a tough tournament to win and those numbers are part of why it’s so hard. I’m sure the list of players who have ever turned any bankroll into $140,000 at the track isn’t a long list. It’s tough to do and takes a certain type of fearlessness, skill, and luck. I remember in the poker world often hearing that in the short term, luck matters a lot. In the long term, it’s barely worth accounting for. If you play and bet the races multiple days per week, over the long term, you have so many opportunities for variance to get smaller and your results are more based on your abilities. 

As I mentioned earlier, having the plays available to view for each player is a great learning opportunity for players old and new. I think it’s so interesting to find out how each player got to where they are in the contest. One mistake I think people may make when analyzing plays is to only focus on the players who won and think that they all did the “right” thing. I mean, they did the right thing to win today. But what I’m getting at is that I think sometimes people don’t realize there were likely many players who made very good plays that if the final race or two would have played out differently, would have resulted in different winners. I don’t say that to take away from what the top finishers did, just more to be aware that sometimes in our game you can make really great decisions, and not be rewarded. 

These big cash money tournaments also often force people to play horses at the end that they don’t actually like in terms of handicapping. I mean if you have $2,000 left in your bankroll, it’s not like betting the favorites in any way is going to get you over $100,000. You might like a 6-1 shot, but you’re going to have to find some prices to pair up with that horse in exotics if you’re going to get 50-1 or more on your money. Game theory starts to come into play so much more than handicapping as these tournaments go on. I think that’s one of the reason these tournaments are so fun. Of course the day to day exercise of trying to turn your money into more money is an interesting and challenging endeavor. But I think the cash contests really offer an added wrinkle of game theory into the equation. 

For years, these big buy-in tournaments were the only way to play cash tournaments. Most of the smaller ones were always Win/Place type events that of course feature a different strategy and are fun in their own way. But one of the really great things that TwinSpires has done in the tournament section is making cash tournaments so much more inclusive for players of all bankrolls and for many different tracks. Those are great training grounds (and money making grounds) if you’re looking to sharpen up before you take on the big dogs in a tournament like the BCBC. 

I was always a gambler first when it came to racing and I think it’s important to celebrate horseplayers and the game of horseplaying, especially when we have these big signature events. So congratulations to Dave Smyth and all the players who hit the leaderboard in the BCBC. We know many hundreds of players will be back again next year!