Player Profiles: Sabbath
I recently had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with the team captains for the upcoming Sim World Cup. I first made an appointment with Sabbath, the captain of Team Europe.
Sabbath is one of the game’s original players, having started in week 117. He missed the very first week of racing only because he was busy diligently reading the instructions over and over. He came to the game by searching on AltaVista for horse-racing games. Most of what he came across were board games, but he stumbled across a little web-based game called Simulated Sports. The rest is history.
Speaking of History, Sabbath has trained some of the best-known horses of the sim’s early days. Folks who were around in 1998-2001 will remember High Cozzene, a hard knocking mare who won 9 graded races in her 100 starts. She was tough on both surfaces and highly competitive for several seasons. Oldtimers will also remember Sister Rum, the Storm Cat mare who ran beautifully from 6-8 furlongs in 1999. She won three graded races from 99 starts, back in the days when that was a more challenging task than it was now. His best day in the game came in the 2000 Equinics, when each of these horses one a gold medal (he also won a silver and a bronze that day).
As one of the original players, Sabbath has seen many changes over the years. In the early days, players couldn’t breed their horses, but obtained two-year-olds through a draft/lottery process (I have vivid memories of laying out countless index cards and prioritizing the 20 horses per stable I could put in a bid for). Horses often ran every week and there were fewer than 10,000 horses. There weren’t yet jockey instructions and Sabbath, like many of us, remembers the “click bank” days, when players had to click on banner ads many times a day to get an edge for claims and jockey selection. Sabbath also recalls that once upon a time every horse in the game was brown. He was particulary annoyed by “simflation,” a period when money in the game was close to worthless. Good horses would go for $10 million or more in the auction and players could win hundreds of thousands of dollars per week gambling. Caps have controlled the runaway simflation, but Sabbath remembers it as a real problem at the time. On the positive side, the advent of breeding was a huge deal at the time and Sabbath considers it the greatest improvement he has seen in his time playing the sim.
But Sabbath prefers to focus closer to today, so when asked for a favorite horse, he names Tete Novembre. While less of a high-profile name, Sabbath finds him to be a near-ideal horse for his goals: “He’s not a great horse, and he will probably not win a grade I, but he is probably my most useful homebreed and a great example of what I want out of a horse. I want a horse to have time to develop and instead have a long career. I really doesn’t like running 2yo’s or pre-summer 3yo’s in stakes races, and it’s only few time I do that – just to prove to myself it’s totally pointless. Tete Novembre is a grade III-II horse, and a damn good one. He has been the perfect horse for someone from Sweden that loves to race their horses in Sweden as he manages races from the mile to 12 furlongs. No other horse has ever won all four grade races at T8+ at Sweden until Tete Novembre did that. So after his run in the up-coming Capital’s Major Prize (G3) Tete Novembre is going to run in the remaining graded turf race at Sweden, Capital Spring Sprint (G3), which is a 6 furlong race. A win in that race would probably make me lose my mind”
As one of the original players, Sabbath has seen many changes over the years. In the early days, players couldn’t breed their horses, but obtained two-year-olds through a draft/lottery process (I have vivid memories of laying out countless index cards and prioritizing the 20 horses per stable I could put in a bid for). Horses often ran every week and there were fewer than 10,000 horses. There weren’t yet jockey instructions and Sabbath, like many of us, remembers the “click bank” days, when players had to click on banner ads many times a day to get an edge for claims and jockey selection. Sabbath also recalls that once upon a time every horse in the game was brown. The advent of breeding was a huge deal at the time and Sabbath considers it the greatest improvement he has seen in his time playing the sim.
Sabbath has bounced around a bit between residencies. He began in Illinois, which merged with Kentucky and Indiana into Kentuckiana. He stayed there until Mike opened a Swedish track, which encouraged Sabbath to help start Viking racing, which later merged with Ireland. He’s now happily at home in Ireland’s residency, where he races his horses whenever possible.
His goal in the game is simply to “win everything,” which I suppose most of us would like to do. He prefers to focus on turf routers, reflecting the racing he finds in Europe. “Even though I have tried and tried to breed for turf and stayers I feel so many of them turn out to be something that isn’t close. I have though noticed a change over the last one and a half year: Speed ratings for turf races are getting higher, and more of my homebreeds are turf stayers. So I guess I’m still suffering from the dirt bias this game had in the early days, as many of my old mares are from that time. It’s also a sign that Mike listens to the players (from outside the US, that almost doesn’t know what a dirt track is) and wants this game to be like the real racing world.”
Of one of his sim buddies, he says his biggest disappointment in the game was “That Dan (Epic) grew up to be an adult. I was sure he would start WWIII right here on this message board, but then he turned out to be as harmful as one of the teletubbies. 😉 (I like Dan!)” His brother also plays the game, and in fact named some pretty dreadful horses in honor of Sabbath’s better horses (Sister Dumb, for example, who had a stakes named after her).
Sabbath has a few improvements in mind that he would like to see someday: “I would like to have the option to create a huge stable with all my horses in. I would love to have travel restrictions so that only grade I and II horses can travel around the globe, where grade III and stakes horses can travel across their continent and other horses has to race in their region. Also the grade race schedule could be modified so that big races would collide. Also making a world series would be great with say 8 to 10 days every year were all eyes would be turned to a specific track. Now there are only Sand Castle and Breeders’ Bowl that does that. Wouldn’t it be great to have a bunch of grade I’s like that at different tracks 6 to 8 times more every year?”
Sabbath recommends that new players get their hands on some starter allowance horses who can run all day: “They might not be the funniest horses to have around the barn, but they do earn some good breeding points. “ He also recommends keeping an eye out for horses with good pedigrees for breeding, who show up even in cheap claimers.
He is particularly fond of Sadler’s Wells as a sire, but also likes turfy sires like Montjeu and Galileo. For a less prominent sire, he’s fond of King’s Best. He also likes to use Swedish sires now and then.
In real life, Sabbath lives in Visby, Sweden, where he teaches high school social studies and religion. He’s very into metal music (hence the name) and enjoys playing guitar (badly) and writing music. He owns a trotting mare named Kyrkebys Asta, who he says looks like a special horse. Watch for her to hit the track in about a year. His favorite real-life racer is a horse named Max Flukt.
When asked for his theme song, Sabbath replies, “While I stopped smoking I got inspiration from a Judas Priest song called “Blood Red Skies”. It’s a song about never giving up and to fight till the bitter end. That’s kind of like me…if I made up my mind about that I wanted.”