HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Trainer Chris Hartman will send out millionaires Tejano Twist and Necker Island against the talented 3-year-old Ryvit in the $150,000 Ring the Bell Stakes on Saturday at Oaklawn Park.

The six-furlong race for 3-year-olds and up shares a card with the $150,000 Mistletoe for fillies and mares at a mile. The races will wrap up an abbreviated first weekend of the meet as there is no card Sunday.

The Ring the Bell field of nine also includes stakes winners Ultimate, Manuelito, Top Gunner, Caddo River, and Sir Wellington.

A new face in the jockey colony this winter at Turfway Park is Tyler Conner, among the leading riders at Penn National. After quickly notching his first local win, he is now eyeing a first stakes victory as he has the call on morning-line favorite Mouffy for Saturday night’s $125,000 My Charmer Stakes at the Florence, Ky., track.

Since Chancery Way recorded a 10-1 upset in the Bear Fan Stakes at Golden Gate Fields last December, she has become established as one of the better California-bred fillies and mares.

Stakes wins in Sacramento and Del Mar since July have helped her reputation. On Saturday, Chancery Way is back in the $75,000 Bear Fan Stakes for statebred fillies and mares at six furlongs and will be favored to win her fourth stakes.

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – He’s a turf horse. He’s a dirt horse. He’s a turf horse and a dirt horse.

Trainer Todd Pletcher is still not sure which of those descriptions fit the versatile Noted, who will close out his 2-year-old campaign as the likely favorite in Saturday’s $100,000 Pulpit Stakes at Gulfstream Park. The Pulpit, which is carded at 7 1/2 furlongs on the turf, will share top billing on the 11-race program along with its filly counterpart, the $100,000 Wait a While.

Dean Delivers stepped up from a statebred stakes score to win this year’s Grade 3 Smile Sprint, then was third in the Grade 1 Alfred G. Vanderbilt at Saratoga. Willy Boi did the same in 2022. The two meet in the $100,000 FTBOA Marion County Florida Sire Stakes on Saturday at Tampa Bay Downs.

The Marion County and the $100,000 FTBOA City of Ocala Florida Sire Stakes for fillies and mares, both at seven furlongs, are co-featured on the 10-race card. Both races, for 3-year-olds and up, are for Florida-breds sired by Florida stallions.

They have met four times in the last 14 months, with each finishing in front of the other twice.

The older Quarter Horses Apollitical Pence and Empressum will meet for the fifth time in the $750,000 Champion of Champions at 440 yards at Los Alamitos on Saturday evening, and there is more at stake than the richest prize for older Quarter Horses.

The winner will almost certainly be named champion aged gelding and will have an excellent argument for World Champion, or Horse of the Year.

The Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies on Nov. 3 at Santa Anita ended before it truly began for the graded stakes winner Chatalas.

“She got totally eliminated at the start, which compromised her chances tremendously,” trainer Mark Glatt recalled Thursday. “She’d never been in a situation where she had to take dirt” in her face.

“She didn’t take too kindly to that.”

From Glatt’s perspective, Chatalas has rebounded in the right manner in advance of her final start of 2023 in Saturday’s Grade 2 Starlet Stakes for 2-year-old fillies at Los Alamitos.

During the first weekend of December, the Parx-based trainer Butch Reid sent two horses to Aqueduct and won stakes races. Morning Matcha captured a New York Stallion Series race and Dr. B the Grade 3 Go for Wand. These were not outliers. Over the last year, Reid-trained shippers have gone 11-3-3-2 in Aqueduct stakes.

“Not bad for a little guy from Philly,” said Reid.

Not bad, and it could get better, with Disco Ebo a live chance Saturday in the $120,000 Garland of Roses.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Trainer Kevin Attard will take two shots at Saturday’s $100,000 La Prevoyante Stakes when he runs Fashionably Fab and Strega in the 1 1/16-mile event for Ontario-sired females.

Fashionably Fab has evolved into one of the leading and most versatile 3-year-old fillies at Woodbine. After getting fried in a speed duel in the Woodbine Oaks on July 23, she was a prominent third in another rich Tapeta route, the Bison City Stakes.

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – With the Gulfstream Park Championship meet now in full swing, who better to check in with for an update than Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher, who again comes to town loaded for the winter season with a star-studded group of young and older horses.

The lengthy list of graded stakes winners features soon-to-be-named juvenile champion Fierceness, whose long-range goal here is the $1 million Florida Derby on March 30.