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Mistakes of a Graduating Newbie
Original article written by Darin Bergquist posted 10 years 2 weeks agoOn Sunday, August 18th, I officially graduate from ‘New Player’ status to ‘Junior’. To celebrate, I thought I would share some of the biggest mistakes I made and lessons I’ve learned so far in hopes that other new players can learn something from my experiences. There is nothing new or earthshattering here that hasn’t been mentioned in other similar articles, but hopefully by continuing to emphasize these points other new players won’t make the same mistakes I did and can become successful in the sim!
1. SIGN UP FOR A MENTOR!! If you get nothing else from this article, this is the most important point. Ideally you would have a mentor before even spending your first sim $$$. I was stubborn and figured that since I knew just a little bit about horse racing, that the sim couldn’t be that hard and I’d figure it out myself. After finally acknowledging that I needed help, I got assigned a great mentor who has been tremendously helpful in getting my stable turned around in only a few weeks’ time. Having a mentor from the start would have avoided all the following mistakes and I’d be much further along than I am now!
2. CONTENTRATE ON MAKING MONEY!! Many new players, like I did, enter the sim with lofty goals such as training the next Triple Crown winner, managing a stable full of stakes runners and/or establishing an immense breeding program. All of these are perfectly good goals – and all require a tremendous amount of sim $$$. If you don’t focus initially on making money, you will be broke long before you get a chance to achieve any of your long term goals. To help with raising money, write articles for the Feature Race News – not only is researching for an article a good way to learn, the $20,000 for each article will come in very handy for building your early racing stable.
3. THE NEW PLAYER SALES PAGE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND!! The New Player Page should be checked daily as it is a wonderful opportunity to pick up good horses at a very cheap price, while not having to compete with the other more experienced stables. The top stables often put decent horses on the new player page for $1 to $1000 just to help the new players get started. With a little work, you should be able to build a substantial money earning stable just with purchases off the New Player page.
4. FOCUS ON BUYING RUNNERS!! In order to make money, you need to find horses that you can make money with right now! See point (2) above! One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was building a stable full of horses that weren’t earning me any money. I had a bunch of yearlings and unraced two year olds – great for down the road, but they were doing nothing to earn me money today. Any yearlings that you buy won’t earn you money until at least early to middle of next season. Any horse that hasn’t had its equipment sorted out will take up 8 weeks before it’s even ready to run its first race. So all of those young promising horses are doing nothing for you today, when you most need the money. This is probably the biggest mistake I made early on. Most, if not all, of your early purchases should be horses that are ready to hit the track immediately. They will have some racing history already, their equipment will be sorted out, and you will have some idea as to the types and level of races they can be entered in to be competitive. Remember that there are two ways to immediately make money from a horse: (1) the horse wins purse money or (2) the horse is claimed for a price higher than you bought it for. Since most of your initial purchases will be low-priced horses off the New Player page, entering in almost any claiming race provides the potential to make money in either of these two ways.
5. LEARN TO PICK THE RIGHT RACES TO ENTER YOUR HORSES!! This topic alone could be the topic of multiple articles, and is probably one of the things I am struggling most with currently. Suffice it to say that repeatedly buying horses running at the $5,000 claimer level and entering them in stakes races is not the way to build your sim $ account!
6. RESEARCH!! The sim rewards those players who put in the time necessary to be successful. A big part of the sim is doing research – whether it is studying bloodlines, racing history or wading through the 100’s of horses listed for sale to find the hidden gems that can make you some money. If you don’t enjoy doing the research and aren’t willing to spend the time necessary to do it, you most likely won’t be successful in the sim. With the importance of information in the sim, becoming a SIMperior member is tremendously helpful. The additional information available to SIMperior members is so important that I can’t imagine now being without it.
These are just a few of the mistakes I made and lessons I learned in the first 20 weeks of the sim. Thankfully, I now have a great mentor and my fortunes are turning around such that I’m looking forward to building and expanding my stable over the next 20 weeks as a ‘Junior’ owner!