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Planting Seeds – Three Decisions I Made as a Newbie

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 10 years 3 weeks ago

Making an impact in SIM can feel like such an impossible task for the newbie player. You see all these other players with stakes horses left and right, and bankrolls in the many millions. Even when you resolve to be patient and believe that your day will come when you’re able to make a big splash with a top horse, or otherwise highly profitable stable, that uphill climb can feel like such a long ways to the top.

I’ve been playing SIM twelve games years, and regularly have over 50 stakes wins and seven million in earnings per year. A chunk of my success in later years can be traced back to some very casual decisions I made my first weeks in SIM, which had some wonderful, long lasting repercussions.

Here are three examples of seeds I planted when I was a new player, without having any idea the beneficial impact they would have in the future.

MY FIRST CREATE A HORSE
My very first day in SIM, I was buying Thoroughbreds off the newbie sales list, and was also given some gift horses. I wanted to buy some game points and Create a Horse, so I’d have a “clean slate” horse of my own. Just for the heck of it, I decided to make it a 2yo Quarter Horse filly. (The mixed breeds were a new thing in SIM that year.) I made her a chestnut and named her Copper Katie. She turned out to be a modest little racehorse, with two allowance wins and some stakes placings, one latter sponsored Grade 1 being primarily responsible for her earnings of nearly $50,000. I retired her at the end of her four-year-old season and bred her to a newly retired stallion, Cocky I Am, which I’d campaigned to one stakes victory. The foal was a filly that I also made a chestnut, and I called her Copper Clone.

Copper Clone turned out to be a nice filly, though she suffered from a lot of seconditis. She went into her 5yo season, in Year 30, with only three stakes victories, but a whole lot of seconds, while racing against the best of her generation. She started off Year 30 with another long, frustrating string of seconds, plus one fourth. I entered her in the Grade 1 $500,000 Moon of Moons for Week 14, hoping she could get a chunk of that nice purse. It was one of my greatest nights In SIM, ever, when she pulled off an upset, winning by a neck.

That still ranks, by far, as the biggest purse I’ve ever won, and Copper Clone is still my highest-earning homebred, as she retired with earnings of over 550k. She is the dam of a nice 2yo stakes winner this year.

Quite a nice long-term result for having just up and decided to Create a Horse, on my first day in SIM.


A DTD YEARLING
I was a little late with paying attention to the Dare to Dream program, where one can be awarded a quality yearling by winning a DTD race at Trial Park. But once I studied the upcoming races for the DTD program, and purchased appropriate horses to run in them, I rather quickly earned the maximum of two DTD prize horses before graduating from my newbie status. Both were fillies.

The second of these fillies was a turf miler named Performing Spells. She was a little frustrating in that she never won a stakes, but she did get three allowance wins, and a restricted stakes placing, while racing through the age of four. Upon retirement, she began producing hard-knocking foals, though bloodstock agent Anna Liza Doolittle would later call her merely a “good” broodmare. While Performing Spells had only one stakes winner among her first three foals, all three were Grade 1 placed and six-figure earners. Her next three ended up being claimers, with one racking up an impressive number of wins.

Her seventh foal was a colt named War Lock. He was an ordinary yearling, with a “hard to tell” gallop, and that was still the case early in his 2yo season. One week before his debut, I gave him another gallop, and he’d suddenly jumped up three levels to be a “scary good”. I’ve never had a “scary” Thoroughbred before, and he went right out and demolished his MSW field by 7.5 lengths, and then won the Grade 1 London Futurity by nearly four lengths.

Thanks to the DTD program, and my having decided to avidly, if belatedly, participate as a newbie, I now, finally, have a potentially top Thoroughbred, and he’s the most exciting youngster that’s ever been in my barn.


THE GIFT THAT WAS ALMOST RETURNED
When I was a newbie, there weren’t so many dollar horses on the sales pages, as there are now. Instead, players often gave a lot of unwanted horses to newbies as unsolicited gifts. This “generosity” got so overwhelming at the end of the year, when players were culling their stables, that I finally had to get on the Forum and, as nicely as I could, tell players to stop giving me horses.

The last straw, that caused me to do that post, was when I received, as yet another gift, a 2yo turf route filly named Earth and Sky, who had started three times, with a sixth and two ninth place finishes. Granted, the latter two were at a mile, but even her race at a route only had a 33 speed figure. She was just awful. I thought about simply refusing to accept her, but that felt mean. So, instead, I decided to do the forum post a few days later. In the meantime, I hesitantly said to the giver, “Thanks, but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with her.” He replied back with words I’d come to dread: “She’ll do well for you at Trial Park.” I’d learned that such words were code for, “She really sucks.” Because what I’d found out, very quickly, was that there was nothing in the water at Trial Park that mysteriously turned lousy horses into decent horses. But since I’d accepted the filly, I was stuck with her.

It turned out that Earth and Sky blossomed at three, relatively speaking, and while I didn’t race her at Trial Park, since there are few appropriate races for turf routers, she started out her sophomore year with two seconds in MSW, and then broke her maiden. She placed in two of her three remaining races. Within her first two starts at four, she was badly beaten, so I tried schooling over jumps to see if she had any talent for steeplechasing. Back then, steeplechase bloodlines were in their infancy, and each Thoroughbred had a random degree of jumping ability. Earth and Sky schooled as a “natural”, which is the best comment, so I turned her into a steeplechaser.

She won her chasing debut by 6.5 lengths, and was second in a stakes her next out. By the time she was retired at the end of her 7yo season, she had won two stakes races, placed in many others, and had four allowance victories.

Once retired, Earth and Sky established a dynasty of steeplechase performers for my stable. Of her five offspring to race over jumps, three are stakes winners (including an exciting young 3yo filly, and a future stallion), and the two others are many times stakes placed. Her 2yo offspring is already a winner on the flat. Since she’s 14yo, Earth and Sky will likely have her final foal this year. Her absence will be greatly felt.

All these wonderful homebred steeplechase performers came about because, as an overwhelmed newbie, I grudgingly decided to accept a gift that I didn’t really want.


So, newbies, as you go about managing your struggling stables, and are trying to do what makes sense one day to the next, know that you’re planting seeds. Many of them will turn out to be irrelevant, but there’s sure to be a gem or two that will grow into future benefits that you have no way of being able to predict at the present time.

Here’s to your future.


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