Player Profiles: Trotter
Sometimes it’s fun to learn what’s behind some of the screen names we see in the game. Folks who’ve been around the game a while have great stories to tell and advice to give. This is the first in a series of BTB articles that will give them an opportunity to tell those tales.
My first victim is Trotter, who runs the Trotter1 Stables empire (and I do mean empire – there are 26 stables under this master stable). Famous in springtime for his Derby Watch articles, Trotter has been playing the Sim since September 2002. As a veteran of almost five years, he has seen tons of changes and has experienced plenty of ups and downs. When asked for a theme song, he named Traffic’s “Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring,” so you can just imagine that playing in the background as you leave.
In real life, Trotter goes by the name of Peter and lives on Long Island with his wife of 32 years. They have three children together. He works at JFK Airport as a Safety Specialist or possibly an FBI agent, depending upon whom you ask. His involvement with real-life racing is limited to watching and betting, though he says “I have torn up enough tickets to have bought a horse or two in my lifetime.” Among real-life racers he is particularly fond of Forego, saying “that horse was scary good.”
Trotter came to racing as an elementary school kid, when his father took him to Aqueduct. He says, “I could read a racing form long before I could read Green Eggs and Ham.” He reminds us that back in those ancient days of yore, your sports game choices were along the lines of Strat-o-Matic Football (which is still completely awesome), “Be a Manager” or “Win, Place, and Show.”
Trotter was frustrated by the lack of good horseracing games. As the Internet developed, he began to hope for a good fantasy racing game. One day as he was surfing the DRF site, he came across an ad for Simulated Sports. “I quickly dismissed it as way too complicated an undertaking at the time,” he adds ruefully. But a few months later he was again surfing the DRF and again came across the Simulated Sports ad. This time he was more patient and it seemed less complicated. “Either that,” he says with a grin, “or I was no desperate for fantasy horse racing action. From that point on, I have never missed a week.”
When he first entered the game he joined Barndog’s now-defunct GSR residency. He found it to be very helpful to new players with lots of active contests. But eventually he found himself focusing too hard on winning the trainers’ contests, “running my horses (on two weeks’ rest, dropping down to low claiming tags etc) to try and win a trainers’ title. I didn’t particularly like running my horses in that fashion, so training contests lost their appeal to me.” He spent some time in Johnno’s Minnesota residency but eventually “begged my way into the [CR Racers] rez, or at least that’s what I am told.” His time in all these residencies overlapped somewhat, but his involvement in CR Racers “escalated to the day-to-day operations of the rez.” When Mike started giving credits for residency support, Trotter put all of his stables in support of CR Racers. He is very supportive of the residency’s structure, which has no trainer contests, but the players all “buy races for each other to race in for bragging rights.” He has “toyed with the idea of opening up a reaz for just state-bred horses,” believing that “this would be a great opportunity to employ some of the game’s underused sires.” In fact, he would love to have a residency take over Upper New York and have residency members create a condition book for ten races per week at that track. This would be a creative combination of residency action and the state-bred program he hopes Mike will one day implement.
In addition to his activities in the CR Racers residency, Trotter has been quite active as a BTB writer. Everyone who reads the BTB has seen his pithy previews of the spring classics in the Bluegrass Derby Watch. He also spent time as New Hampshire beat writer Dexter Broadhurst. His emphasis is now on specialty articles such as the Derby Watch and Eclipse Award articles.
With such a long tenure in the Sim, Trotter has seen a lot of changes. “My all time favorite change is NO MORE CLICK POINTS.” Like many of us, Trotter would log in many times a day to maximize his chances of getting a good jockey. Other additions during Trotter’s tenure have been the ability to breed retired mares, RODOTS, and RaFi, which “makes entry life easy.” He is also a fan of the new Stakes Finder.
When asked about his goals in the game, Trotter goes for the honest route. “The fact is; I want to win. I strive to be the best player in the game. I hate to lose.” He thinks his childhood training in reading the form has imprinted on him the importance of conditions, saying “I rarely, if ever, race a horse of of conditions unless I am setting a horse up for a particular race.” He has a harder time using jockey instructions effectively. He says that “there is a lot of trial and error involved and that usually translates into losing races until you get it right.”
This year Trotter has had some of his best horses ever. Folks who frequent the chatroom have had an earful about WAKI NOTION (67386), a superb six-year-old daughter of Miswaki who has won three of her last four graded races. Another high point was when MORPH THE CAT received an Eclipse nomination and made it into the 2007 Bluegrass Derby field. The Derby itself wasn’t such a high point, since the Cat Thief colt finished last. But Trotter says, “I tend to look ahead rather than dwell in the past.”
Those who know Trotter are well aware that his favorite sire is Miswaki. But “I have also always been partial to breeding along the Fappiano x In Reality nick. More recently he has been using Medaglia d’Oro a fair amount. His favorite obscure sire is Mr. Sinatra, who has given him a couple of good runners. “He was a New York based horse, so I got to watch him race quite a bit during his racing career. I was always impressed by how hard he tried in all his 62 races.”
When asked for advice for new players, Trotter has one word to offer: “Patience.” Expanding on that notion, he says “it takes time to develop your stables and for your horses to develop into stakes runners. This game wouldn’t be the great game that it is if winning a stakes race, or any race for that matter, came easy. Start off playing the claiming game and earn as many breeding points as possible. Resist the breeding bug until you get a good feel for the game and have saved enough breeding points to breed to some top sires.
I asked Trotter if he had any stories from the game he’d like to share, and indeed he did. I can’t improve on it at all with editing or reworking, so I’ll just leave you with it in its entirety:
It was a couple of year’s back, during the Saratoga meet, that on a whim, Irish and myself did a road trip to Saratoga. We had never met before other than chat room conversations, but there was Irish in front of my house at 5 AM on a Sunday morning. Irish is one of the great storytellers of all times, so this trip turned out to be the shortest three hour drives I ever experienced. Now Irish is a horse trainer/owner, one time jockey, grew up on a horse farm, slept with Native Dancer, the whole bit; so to say he knew his way around a stable area is an understatement, but as for me, I’m a city boy who’s closest encounter with a horse outside of a racetrack is the one that stands outside of the supermarket that you motivate by dropping a quarter in the slot. After a hearty breakfast Irish decides to take me on a tour of the stable area of Saratoga, me in my sandals and shorts. He proceeds to tell me, the poster boy for a city slicker, to just look like I belong there. I don’t know if you are familiar with Saratoga after a day of heavy downpours, but for over an hour he had me walking through, hopping over, and stepping through puddles, mud, and things I can’t begin to describe associated with stables. I know he had a good laugh. Prior to our excursion, we had contacted Kingab via email, who was up there at the same time, and arranged to meet with him while we were there. Upon our arrival, after leaving a few messages on his cell phone, at least we thought it was his cell phone, but I have a sneaking suspicion Larry was smart enough not to give us his real number, we went about our business of betting horses, drinking beer, and enjoying the scenery if you know what I mean. We must have seen 20 people that looked like Kingab that day, you know, that touch of grey in the hair and beard, but I swear that last look alike Irish pointed out was a woman, I don’t care how many whiskers she had. Anyway, none of the 20 was Larry, and after surviving 9 races, 100 degree heat, and a ghastly picture, we collected enough empty bottles and cans to fill the gas tank and head back to Long Island. We did receive a call from Kingab somewhere over the Tappan Zee Bridge inquiring where we were…he said he saw about 20 guys that looked just like us…hmm. I’m sure Irish’s version of this story would be much different; he has a knack of seeing things from a whole other perspective. The point is, the friendships made in this game far surpass any game achievements, and it’s that sense of community and friendship that’s the driving force behind the success of this game.