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Horse racing: Needing a new sport to play, handicapper picks a winner

March 12, 2026

Dylan Donnelly’s confidence going into this week’s National Horseplayers Championship tournament in Las Vegas could sound obnoxious coming from anyone else.

But Donnelly, a 34-year-old Rancho Cucamonga resident, can back up his self-assurance with a record of success on the handicapping contest circuit. He’s as prepared as he can be, with a highly organized approach born of a virtually life-long practice at picking winners and betting smartly. And he has already weathered a harder setback in life’s game of chance than anything he’ll have to overcome at the Horseshoe Las Vegas.

“I don’t mean to sound cocky or something,” Donnelly said. “I’m confident I’ll win the NHC one of these years. At least one of them.”

The 27th NHC this Friday through Sunday has drawn more than 600 qualifiers who’ll compete for an $825,000 first prize, including 2025 winner Dan Piazza of Chicago, who’ll try to become the first two-time champion.

As horseplayers’ tournaments have risen in popularity in recent decades, forming a series similar in format to golf, tennis or poker tours, its best players have come to rival public handicappers as the stars of the game.

Donnelly is one of those stars.

He finished fourth in the latest tally of NHC Tour points, behind leader Dave Nichols of Wayne, Pennsylvania. He collected $125,000 in prize money for finishing fifth in last year’s championship event in Las Vegas after being second heading into the “final table” on Sunday, his best showing in six appearances. It was the second year in a row that Donnelly earned prize money by finishing in the top 10%.

Although he bets on everyday races too, Donnelly said tournaments have become his priority both for the chance they provide to maximize income from handicapping (“I like getting a cool big check”) and the enjoyment of trash-talking with friendly rivals.

Donnelly had been a cross-country and track runner at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, and played adult-league baseball into his 20s. Then the athletic part of his life ended suddenly.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 2016, he and a friend were driving home from a hunting trip in Northern California in Dylan’s grandparents’ motorhome. Dylan was lying down on a bed while the friend drove. On Interstate 5 near Kettleman City, an axel overheated and a wheel came off. The vehicle went out of the control and rolled over several times, landing in the northbound lanes. Dylan suffered a fracture of the C5 vertebrae. (The friend was less seriously hurt.)

He uses a wheelchair but is thankful the outcome wasn’t worse. He has use of his upper body and can drive, and thanks to ongoing physical therapy he can stand and walk short distances with support. And he realizes that if the mechanical failure had happened a week earlier, it could have been his grandparents in the RV, and if it had been a week later, it would have been his younger brother and friends on a trip they’d been planning.

“I’m a mentally strong person, so I’m glad it happened to me and not someone else,” Dylan said.

Donnelly feels lucky in another way: His injury didn’t get in the way of his passion for horse racing. In fact, it intensified it, prompting him to channel his competitive nature into handicapping.

“This is my competition,” he said.

He’d gotten into racing through his grandfather, Robert. While his parents were at work, Sean as a construction project manager and Eileen as a paralegal, Robert, who’d been a Northrup engineer, babysat Dylan. That is to say, they spent afternoons at Santa Anita, where Robert would give the child $20 to bet and lift him up so he could push the buttons on the parimutuel machines.

“He taught me how to handicap,” Donnelly said of his grandfather. “I also saw how not to manage your money.”

Donnelly describes his handicapping approach as “very simple.” For a given race, he asks: Which horses are proven fast enough to win? Which have shown they can win if the pace is as quick or sluggish as appears likely? Which have shown an affinity for this distance? Unlike many players who think getting value in the odds requires betting on horses making their first try at a distance, surface or class level, Donnelly prefers horses who have done it successfully already. He often finds generous odds in horses whose form is “dirtied up” by an excusable loss.

He handicaps on paper, using a black ballpoint pen to mark up printed-out Daily Racing Form Formulator past performances. For tournaments, which can require handicapping dozens of races, it becomes a team effort, with Donnelly’s wife Megan helping to transcribe his speed figures onto the past-performance charts. (Their son Hunter, a high school sophomore, is not yet involved.) Those figures are based on commercially available ratings, adjusted for Donnelly’s observations about horses’ performances on three video screens.

Asked for his advice for horseplayers trying to get better, Donnelly said: “Don’t spread so much (in multi-horse bets). Be OK with being wrong.” He means: Wait for races in which you have clear opinions, and then back those opinions confidently without hedging.

Donnelly liked British Isles in the Santa Anita Handicap on Saturday, and the 5-year-old won the 1¼-mile race at 7-1 odds.

“He was the only one who had shown he could go that far, and that’s massive,” Donnelly said, referring to British Isles’ strong efforts in 1½-mile and 1⅜-mile races (on turf). Donnelly said he wasn’t put off by British Isles’ fifth-place finish in the Pegasus World Cup in Florida in January: “I upgraded his Pegasus a lot because he was running on the inside and the inside was not where you wanted to be (at Gulfstream Park).”

When we spoke Monday morning at a coffee house in Upland, Donnelly was already showing off his list of the NHC’s available races from around the country, color-coded to indicate which races looked promising to him.

“This gets my competitive juices flowing,” Donnelly said of anticipating the contest. “It’s a good rush.”

His well-earned confidence could pay off big this weekend.

Follow horse racing correspondent Kevin Modesti at X.com/KevinModesti.

Orange County Register

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Horse racing: Needing a new sport to play, handicapper picks a winner

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