A Happy Anniversary

This weekend marks an anniversary of sorts for me.  It was about a year ago last September when I Google’d my way to the Sim.

I had played an online racing game of a different sort for a while in 2004, but there wasn’t too much realism there—not enough real-life injection, and not much reward.  When their server went belly-up, and never really came back, I went looking for another racing game, and on a whim, came across the SimulatedSports.com Horse Racing Game.  And the rest is history.  The Sim seemed so much a colossal leap forward that I signed up for a stable, then two, and then never looked back.

How have I done?  Well, that’s more or less a question best left unasked in mixed company. 

It should be noted first that my initial approach to the Sim was not unlike most new players.  It was first a “Damn the torpedoes!” sort of thing.  My first mistake was thinking that since back then there was only one day of racing per week, horses surely would almost always be fresh, and you could race them with great frequency.  Basically, I wanted to pull what I called an Oscar Barrera (those without much love for New York racing in the 1980s can call it a “Golden Man”): enter them, then enter them back, then enter them again.  Needless to say, the wins weren’t exactly coming in droves.  That’s not even to mention that my horses would come back groggy, or, worse, come back “ready to go” but would run worse and worse until their computer chip spirits were broken.  If you look at my early numbers for those days, you would have seen a couple seconds, a couple thirds, maybe, but a big fat goose-egg in the win column.  When I managed to get my first win, which, if I’m recalling correctly, was a do-nothing horse named Unbridled Pro who popped at 120-1 only to never be heard from again, it was a relief.  (That I won at 120-1 with that horse is not in dispute, but my first win was a really, really long time ago.  You have to admit, though, winning at 120-1, even if it wasn’t my “first time”, makes for a much better story.)

But even having a winning percentage that was worse than anything the Kansas City Royals could come up with didn’t deter my addiction.  I was training and racing and looking for good spots for my stables, and was beginning to enjoy myself.  So, after starting my cvbear and outthere stables, I branched out to my kaffbear and invisible stables, picked up a couple of firsters no one wanted from the horse pool, and started work on elevating my game.  I discovered the message boards, discovered some of the nifty tools other players and residencies had to offer, and started to play the game more responsibly.  I was sick to death of a meager winning percentage, bored with having a bunch of 120-1 shots finishing up the track, and I figured if the Sim operated more closely with the real work, maybe I should also. 

And with that, the numbers began to grow.  I started getting more winners, slowly, and these horses began to respond to the better care I was giving them.  After the start of the year, I had enough BP to start looking at breeding horses, and I bought some credits, and dove into a brave new world of creating my own runners.  It wasn’t pretty at first, because while I knew bloodlines well enough as a long-time fan, it was something else entirely to try to breed a champion by trying to mix various pedigrees.  As most people will tell you from the Sim, it often is a crapshoot.  But when you get it right, it’s like you just won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.  In February, about maybe a month after I started playing around, I had bred my first stakes winner, Pueblo.  Take one part Cherokee Run, one part Runaway Groom, one part Well Decorated, and mix.  The win takes on a new glow as time goes on—part of that was just it being my first stakes win, part of it is who I beat in that race, a very good three-year-old by the name of Six Pulpit’s, who’s since become a two-time Grade II winner..  So, naturally I smile at the memory.

Winning, or maybe just improved results, gives you more confidence.  So I bred more horses.  I opened more stables (addicting, remember).  I chose my jockeys, selected my settings, found appropriate spots for my horses, and claimed, and sold, and bought, and bred over (sometimes all at once), and while my win totals, my earnings, and my collection of BPs will never rival the big guns, I’m a better player than I was a year ago.  A lot of it was sensibility, a bit of it was luck, some of it was risks that paid, and a bit of it was chemistry.

In one year, I’ve gone from running my horses every Saturday that had an “y” in it to spacing my races accordingly for just about everyone.  I’ve gone from one stable to 40 stables, which while challenging can be juggled with a little practice.  I’ve gone from zero stakes wins, or stakes-caliber horses, to three stakes winners and about a dozen or so who don’t look out of place at stakes level.  I’ve gone from being a little too reserved and inexperience to breed a horse to playing and experimenting whenever I have points to spare.  I have not been able to breed a Storm Cat, but I did claim one for $50,000 and he’s running well in allowance company right now.  I haven’t found a great horse in the auction, but I did recently manage to buy a two-time stakes winning son of Unbridled’s Song for about $22,000 at auction.  I have a lot of horses still who probably couldn’t win a $2,000 maiden claimer if they were running against a solar-powered calculator, but I’m still hell-bent on breeding the Next Big Thing in the Sim, playing with sires, pedigrees, inbreeding and outcrosses and all that other stuff that’s a tad too complex for me to get right just now.

I’ve been here a year.  Through 2,035 starts, I have 105 winners from my stables.  That’s just over a 5% win percentage, which for a relatively new player is, I think, pretty…OK.  If you’re a new player, and you’re looking at the horses, the BP, the win percentage, and you’re thinking that you’re not good at this, take heart.  Explore your horses, find your rhythm, use an approach to the Sim that works for you.  Play with the tools that are available.  Use the message boards to your advantage.  But most of all, play the game, experiment with breeding, and be patient.  The time will come when you won’t have to rely on 120-1 shots to bring home the BP needed to breed the next champion.