Another week of the fast-action short-court Jai-Alai finished on Tuesday, June 15th, with Magic City professional Jai-Alai player Kyle Kubala securing the Golden Cesta Award with his 5-wins for the week. Three other players were close behind with 4-wins; Anderluck, Douglas and Vuelo. This was Kubala’s 2nd Golden Cesta Award at Magic City since week 11 of 2018 when SayHiLi’s statistician started tracking this prestigious award.

The 2021 regular season Singles Championship is turning out to be quite a battle with lead changes happening regularly. Currently there are 6-players with 22-26 singles wins. RonRon and Ben lead this group with 26 wins, Julen had 25, Anderluck 24, while Benny and Ikeda have 22. There is another group of 5-players not far behind with 14-18 singles wins. El Barba tops this second group with 18, Douglas has 16, Kubala 15, while Spinner and Tennessee have 14-wins each. The next most wins behind the second group is led by Carballo and Vuelo with 8-wins each.

The second 2021 Doubles Tournament of the year is being dominated by 3-teams. Cool Fitness-Spinner have 17-wins and lead two teams with 12-wins each, the teams of Carballo-Tennessee and Kubala-Benny. The team of El Barba-Ikeda is a distant 4th with 7-wins and two other teams have 5-wins each. Several teams are struggling with 3% wins and a 21% ITM. Kubala-Benny have a large lead in the ITM category with 59.3% while the win leader team of Cool Fitness-Spinner have a 48.5% ITM. Carballo-Tennessee have a 45.6% ITM while Diaz-Douglas are 4th with 43.3% ITM. Juice returned to play this week starting Sunday after recovering from knee surgery and already the team of Juice-RonRon have 2-wins in their 10 appearances for the week for 20% wins and a respectable 40% ITM (10-2-0-2), so bettor’s better beware of the Juice-RonRon team.

The big win of the week came on Monday’s Mat-2 performance when a lucky Mighty Ocho bettor spent $8 on a ticket at Derby Lane in St. Petersburg and was the only winner of 8/8 correct winners to nail the $5,000 guaranteed payoff. That bettor’s winning ticket was 6/2+4/5/1+4/3/4/3+8/2. The winning sequence was heavily chalk for the games and at least one more bettor would have also had all 8-winners had the 8-post of Kubala-Benny won their game point in the 7th game. In the event of 2-winners with all 8-correct winners, the winning tickets would have split the consolation payoff and collected $15.20 each. There was a total of $76 wagered on the Mighty Ocho for this performance and consolation payback is 40% of the amount wagered. This is the first time in the history of Jai-Alai in the United States that a bettor has successfully hit all 8-winners of a Pick 8 wager. Congratulations Mr. K!

Week 8 kicks-off on Saturday, June 19th, with a 4-pm performance where live fans are allowed in the fronton. Seating starts at 3:30 pm. Don’t forget the exciting H2H doubles games start at 1-pm and also, be sure to get those Magic City Fantasy Jai-Alai League selections locked-in before the start of Saturday’s game 1! The Jai-5 is getting “Jai” with a nice carryover of $3,423.60 and will clear the $4,000 level on Saturday, so be sure to give this big jackpot wager a shot!