Up to $200,000 is paid out in each of the three specialty divisions. First-place teams in every division are guaranteed $150,000, plus an additional $25,000 available to any first-place roper mounted on a Riata rope horse.
Then it gets interesting. The three champion teams — six ropers total — spin a roulette wheel to determine who takes home a Custom Laredo 2027 F350 Dually 4x4 Diesel Lariat Package conversion truck. That spin happens at the Riata Showcase Horse Sale.
Three divisions, three champion teams, one truck, and a wheel. It's a genuinely novel piece of event design, and it guarantees that the last thing anyone remembers from Rope Horse Rewards Day isn't a time — it's a spin.
How you get in
There are two paths, and both run through the fall.
Monthly drawing winners. Every roper/horse combination drawn in one of the National Rope Horse Rewards monthly cash drawings receives a qualification spot. Those drawings happen on or around the 15th of each month, live on EQN Sports, with up to 20 winners drawn per month.
The Rope Horse Rewards Championships. Five RHR Championships run alongside the Riata Championships at the Lazy E Arena in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Sept. 23–27. Every horse that places in the aggregate at those events qualifies for the Finals in Las Vegas.
A qualification win puts a roper into one division only — you enter once per division, and each win maps to a single division. Choose accordingly.
Entry rules worth knowing now
- Entry is $2,500 per roper.
- A qualified roper can invite a guest partner, provided that partner has an entered registered horse in the program.
- Entries in each division are awarded first come, first served, and are only available to horses and ropers eligible at the time they qualified.
- WSTR processes the entries, alongside the opportunity to reserve hotel rooms and stalls if available.
- Divisions cap at 100 teams, and an entry spot will not be held for an incomplete team. If you don't have a partner locked in, you can lose the spot.
There's also a hard deadline that catches people: any Rope Horse Rewards program horse that earns a check at an RHR Championship event qualifies for a discount on 2026 Ariat WSTR Finale entry — but contestants have to enter both the Rope Horse Rewards Vegas Finals and the WSTR Finale no later than Oct. 15 to hold that eligibility and get the discounted entry. WSTR rules apply.
That puts real weight on the Guthrie week in late September. Qualify there, and you've got roughly two and a half weeks to get your Vegas paperwork done.
Why the day exists
Rope Horse Rewards Day is the sharp end of a broader idea: that a rope horse's record ought to be worth something the way a race horse's or a cutting horse's record is worth something. The National Rope Horse Rewards Program — a partnership between the Riata Stallion Incentive, the American Quarter Horse Association and Equine Network's GEMS-operated events — tracks earnings on registered horses across ropings all season long, then routes those results into cash drawings and, eventually, into this.
The $25,000 Riata bonus attached to each division champion is pointed in the same direction. So is the requirement that horses be AQHA registered to enter the program at all. Documented horses, documented earnings, and a December payday that rewards both.
For an industry where prize money has historically followed the rider and left no trace on the horse, a roping day where every entry traces back to a registered, tracked animal is a meaningful structural shift — dressed up, appropriately enough, with a truck and a roulette wheel.
Key dates
- Sept. 23–27 — Rope Horse Rewards Championships, Lazy E Arena, Guthrie, Oklahoma
- On or around the 15th of each month — monthly cash drawings, live on EQN Sports
- Oct. 15 — deadline to enter the RHR Vegas Finals and WSTR Finale for eligibility and discount
- Dec. 9 — Rope Horse Rewards Day, Ariat WSTR Finale
Program details, entry links and drawing results are at RiataBuckle.com. Coverage runs on EQN Sports and Roping.com.
