Your Friend, The Search Page - The Unfilled Box

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 8 years 3 weeks ago

If you are a newish player, or otherwise struggling to keep your SIM financial head above water, it's a good bet that you really wish you could earn more purse money. If your barn is full of worthless nags, that can't earn purse money, you might feel stuck, since you don't have enough money to buy better horses.

What are you to do? There is one little box on the right side of the Search page that is your key to more purse money.

About a third of the way down, is a line that says "Status". Your options are "Open", "Unfilled", and "Full". An open race is one that can take more entries. A full race is one with a full field of twelve, so any subsequent entries would need for the race to split before they can run.

Purse money always goes back to fifth place. Therefore, a "filled" race has at least five horses -- ie, all the available purse money for that race will be won. An "unfilled" race is one with less than five horses. On the Search page, clicking the "Unfilled" box will show you all races that currently have three or fewer entries.

That "Unfilled" box is the most powerful box on the entire Search page, if not in the entire SIM. It's your gateway to every race that has less than four horses entered. If you run in a race with five or fewer horses, you are guaranteed to earn purse money, no matter how slow your horse is. Start putting your worthless horses in races that have five or fewer horses, and they'll all start earning purse money.


THE FILLER STRATEGY
Entering horses based upon field size is known as "running fillers". The beauty of it is that it doesn't necessarily matter if the type of horse matches the type of race. In other words, I might have a worthless "different career" galloper that is a dirt sprinter. Normally, I would only put a dirt sprint horse in a dirt sprint race. However, since the horse is a horrendous slowpoke, anyway, I can enter him in any type of race with five or fewer horses, and I'll earn money, even if all he does is follow the rest of the horses around the track.

With fillers, I don't like running for fifth place money, since that only pays 2% of the purse ($200 for a $10,000 for purse) and, at best, only covers round-trip shipping costs. The exception is for a lucrative stakes race. For example, a race with a $300,000 purse would pay $6,000 for finishing fifth. So, even considering the $3,000 entry fee, that would be worth running my slowpoke in, if the race only has five horses.

Fourth place money is very much worth running for, since it pays 7% of the purse ($700 for a $10,000 purse), which is only 3% less than the 10% that finishing third pays. Granted, having a lot of fourth place finishes will wreak havoc with your on-the-board percent, to say nothing of your win percent, but if you're struggling financially, you can beef up your percents another day. Struggling financially means it's time to get serious about earning purse money, and the "Unfilled" box is the fastest way to finding out which races have three or fewer entries, so that your horse makes a fourth entry, and will at least get fourth place money.


CAVEATS
Certainly, the most challenging aspect of using a filler strategy is entering your horse early enough that it has time to ship to the track before the race (so it isn't too tired to run well), and yet, not shipping so early that other horses enter the race in the meantime, and the race ends up having more than five entries by post time, which means you're no longer guaranteed to earn purse money.

It can be a learning process to refine when the best window of time is for you to enter your horses, so that you have the best chance of being certain that a small field will remain small, since there's so little time left to enter, and yet your horse will still get to the track in time to recover from however far he had to ship. (In my experience, most farm-rested horses are fully recovered from shipping halfway around the world, in two days.)

Also, sometimes the races with the smallest fields are ones in far-away places. If you're the type of player who is skittish about shipping a long ways, all I can suggest it to Get Over It. If you want to use the filler strategy to boost your purse earnings, then you need to be willing to ship to places that other players don't want to go. However, having said that, you would also need to weigh the cost of the ship against potential purse earnings. I certainly would not suggest paying a $1000 ship to run in a race with a $10,000 purse, where your horse is part of a four-horse field, and you can only count on getting fourth place money of $700. If you think your horse might be good enough to win, then that would be something to consider in your decision of whether or not to ship that far.

On the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to spend the money on a long ship, to run fourth of four in a stakes race with a $100,000 purse, since that would $7,000. That's quite a chunk of change for a deadbeat horse to earn! Even if one other horse enters by the time the race is run, my horse would still earn $2,000 for running fifth, so I wouldn't lose money, even considering the $1,000 entry fee. If I'm lucky, my horse might even beat a horse or two, and thereby make the long ship well worth it.


BE OPEN MINDED
There's surely lots of unfilled races where you don't have a horse that fits the criteria of the race. (I have a huge stable, and yet often don't have a rested horse available for a particular race.) For example, if you only race Thoroughbreds, you aren't going to see any point in looking at unfilled races for Appaloosas. (In fact, you might filter your search to include just Thoroughbreds.) However, if you're serious about earning purse money, you might want to relax your standards a bit. While trying to build up one's bank balance, I wouldn't be too fussy about what types of horses one is willing to race. If the purse money is out there, why not pursue it? Of course, it first takes finding a horse cheap enough on the sales page, that it's profitable to run it as a filler.

Later, once you've earned enough money to put your grandiose SIM plans into action, you can get rid of all those "filler" horses that you never wanted in the first place.

I can't speak for how things will be at some future point when you might be reading this article, but I do know that, right know, with the implementation of Saturday races for mixers in Year 41, that Paint and Appaloosa races, in particular, have a shocking number of small fields. The are regularly 4yo+ maiden filly races with no entries, or just one entry.


PLEASANT SURPRISES
One of the wonderful things about running fillers is that, usually, you go into the race with the assumption that your horse will finish last in a small field, and still earn purse money. But sometimes your deadbeats will surprise you, and finish better than expected (perhaps because they finished in front of even worse deadbeats), and you'll therefore earn more money than anticipated. Certainly, it doesn't happen every day, but I'm not the only player who has run my horse in a stakes race, expecting to finish fourth of four, and have it up and win.

Also, there is something funky about match races. A match race is any race with just two entries. Match races tend to happen more in mixers than in Thoroughbreds, and I have quite a bit of experience with racing in two-horse fields. Sometimes, Horse A is way, way, WAY better than Horse B, from every possible standpoint. And yet, Horse B will manage to get up and beat Horse A by a nose. I've been on both the winning and losing side of quite a few shocking finishes, when it comes to match races. So, don't assume you'll automatically lose, when you enter your deadbeat against a multiple race winner, and those are the only two horses in the race.


REALLY, IT WORKS
I'm one of the wealthiest players in the SIM, despite having raced pitifully few genuinely great horses, considering how many years I've played.

Like anybody else, I have my share of disappointing, deadbeat horses -- if not more than my share. Year 40 was a dismal year for my stable. Even though over 500 horses made at least one start under my ownership, I only had one horse that earned as much as 200k in the year. That was shockingly pitiful, compared to prior years. My win percent was the lowest ever, and my number of stakes wins the lowest in quite a few years, despite racing more horses than in the past. It happens. But here's the mind-blowing thing. Despite a relatively bad year, I had my second best year ever, in total purse earnings. My stable earned over ten million dollars in purses, even in the face of so many lackluster horses.

What was one of the biggest reasons for all those earnings last year? The answer is the Unfilled button on the Search page.

I use the Unfilled button every single day. I look for races with few horses, to be run the next couple of days, and try to find a horse to put in those races. I'm the proof that doing such on a regular basis pays off. When it comes to purse money, there's just no substitute for running in small fields, because your horse is guaranteed to earn something. The more horses you race in fields of five horses or less, even if they're bad horses, the more it adds up.


PSSST... PUT ME OUT OF THE FILLER BUSINESS
After reading this, you might be thinking, "The filler strategy sounds good, but what's the point if the author of this article is trying to enter her horses in the same races with small fields that I'm trying to enter my horses in? That's not going to leave many unfilled races for me to choose from."

Here's my reply: Since I already have plenty of money, I don't need to earn more money from unfilled races. I would much, much rather see newish players, or otherwise struggling players, earn that purse money in small fields, rather than myself. The only reason I search for those races is because so many other players just plain won't be bothered, or perhaps don't realize how easy it is to find them. Few things in SIM offend me more than leaving purse money on the table. When there's so many players that wish they had more SIM money, it's distressing that there are so many races with such small fields that there's not enough horses in the race to earn all the available purse money. If more players entered their horses in unfilled races, so that there were few left that showed up in an "Unfilled" search, then I'd stop looking for unfilled races.

I wait until roughly 30 hours before entries close for any particular race day, before I search for unfilled races for that race day. I figure that, if a field has three or fewer entries by 30 hours before entries close, then probably nobody else is going to enter. So, my horses get entered (and immediately shipped to the race), instead.

If you want to get serious about running fillers, look for unfilled races, say, 36-40 hours before entries close. If there's more than three horses in a race, the race won't show up when I do my daily task of searching for unfilled races. Then, you'll earn the purse money from those races, rather than me earning it. That thought makes me happy.

I actually went quite a few game years when I didn't look for unfilled races, except on rare occasions. It seemed that enough players were looking for those races, that most races were getting filled with at least four horses, and since I had plenty of money, I didn't need to be bothered. A few game years ago, however, I happened to run an Unfilled search and saw how many juvenile races there were with small fields, which was all the mores surprising, since it was early in the game year, and most players are usually eager to get their 2yo sprinters running. Yet, I found 2yo race after 2yo race, scheduled to be run in just a couple of days, that just had one or two horses entered. Most were in Japan, or other far-away places. I shipped my horses to those races, and many of them won their debuts, even though they weren't particularly good horses. That put me back on the road to searching for unfilled races as a daily SIM activity.

Put me out of business as a player who uses the filler strategy. Put your horses in those races, so you can earn that purse money, instead of me.

All it takes to find races with three or fewer entries is going to the Search page and clicking the "Unfilled" button.

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