Magic City Jai-Alai 2021 Regular Season Debut Saturday, May 1
By Straymar
The exciting and fast-paced action of short-court Jai-Alai returns to the Magic City Jai-Alai court at 4-pm on Saturday, May 1st. Magic City Jai-Alai fans have been anxiously awaiting the return of Magic City phenom Douglas who missed a large portion of the 2021 10-week mini-season due to a wrist injury. Douglas will kick-off the regular season by playing only in doubles games for Week 1 and is expected to start playing at least one singles game a performance starting Week 2.
Players Bueno and Juice are both sidelined Week 1 due to injuries. Bueno is suffering from chronic shoulder pain and will miss Week 1. He will be scratched from play for Saturday & Sunday. The Monday & Tuesday double-header entries have been re-uploaded without Bueno in the entries so be careful to use only the newly released entries & programs without Bueno for Monday/Tuesday. Juice is out with a knee injury and is expected to be out for 2-weeks to a month while recovering. SayHiLi wishes the best to both of these players in their recovery! We believe this is the first time Bueno has scratched in his entire Magic City Jai-Alai career which is an amazing accomplishment for such a physically demanding sport.
The 2nd Doubles Tournament of 2021 again looks to be another highly competitive event with evenly-matched teams thanks to doubles tournament matchmaker, Scott Savin. The doubles teams are as follows: Anderluck-Vuelo, Bueno-Ben, Carballo-Tennessee, Cool Fitness-Spinner, CRB-Bradley, Diaz-Douglas, El Barba-Ikeda, Jeden-Julen, Juice-RonRon and Kubala-Benny. The top four teams in the 1st 2021 Doubles Tournament remain the same for this 2nd tournament: Kubala-Benny, Bueno-Ben, Juice-RonRon and Ikeda-El Barba. The doubles tournament games will continue to be played in games 5 and 7 like previously during the 2021 10-week mini-season.
The 2021 regular season now features the addition of a Daily Double wager, a $2.00 minimum wager. There is an early Daily Double games 1&2 and a late Daily Double games 7&8. There are only 8-games a performance now, so the game 9 superfecta game has been discontinued and all eight games are 7-point games with points doubling after the first round (aka the Spectacular 7 format). The Mighty Ocho wager, a $1.00 Pick 8 Jackpot wager which works exactly like the “Jai-ly” popular Jai-5 wager now has a $5,000 guaranteed jackpot to a single winner correctly picking all 8-winners in games 1-8; this is increased $1,000 from the previous $4,000 guaranteed jackpot. The Jai-5 Jackpot wager, with it’s $2,000 guaranteed jackpot to a single winning ticket, still starts with game 3 (games 3-7). There are still two Pick 3’s on the wagering menu, however they are now games 2-4 and 6-8. Magic City’s Pick-X wagers still offer the low takeout rate of 20% which is 5% lower than the Jai-Alai industry standard of 25% for these type of wagers.
Live fans are being allowed in the spectator area to watch the Saturday 4-pm performances only and this kicks-off with Week 2 for the Saturday, May 8th performance. Note the addition of exciting H2H doubles games on Saturdays at 1-pm before the 4-pm performance; these start on Saturday May 1st. The H2H games are not open for live fan viewing so please take note of this when planning your next visit to Magic City Jai-Alai. H2H singles will be played on Mondays only at 10-am. There is an amazing $100,000 in total H2H prize money for the singles and doubles H2H so get ready for some intense competition. Remember to watch all H2H games on The Jai-Alai Channel and if you miss the live games be sure to watch after the fact.
The Magic City schedule for the 2021 regular season is 6-performances a week from May through November. Here is the schedule:
- Saturday: 4:30 pm
- Sunday: 1-pm
- Monday: 1-pm and 4:30-pm
- Tuesday: 1-pm and 4:30-pm
Last but not least, the highly popular Magic City Fantasy Jai-Alai league kicks off again this week, a continuation of the first 10-week mini-season of 2021 for the grand prize (a one-of-a-kind merchandise prize). Be sure to go to www.fantasyjaialai.com to sign-up to submit your picks for this opening week of the regular season (everyone needs to sign-up again). You can win up to $100 a week for being the first place finisher and possibly even more depending on the number of live entries for the week. A special thanks to Andrew Blechman, Fantasy League Commissioner, for all his efforts in running this Fantasy Jai-Alai league!