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Patience is the Key!
Original article written by Julia H posted 5 months 3 weeks agoHello fellow (new) players!
Today, I want to mention a virtue that is in my opinion the most important one to a successful career in simhorseracing: Patience.
I had to learn it the hard way because I would consider myself as a really impatient person. This stood in my way when I began playing. Learning to wait is the key in all areas of the game. So let us take a closer look.
Buying Horses
You start out with 100k simdollars as soon as you register yourself. This is quite a budget! Your first action probably will be to buy some horses. But be careful: do not spend all your money at once for more expensive or too many horses. If you are not satisfied by the offered horses in claiming races or on the sales page, my advice would be to terminate your search for this day. Keep looking once a week but do not force yourself to buy some horses just because you did not find anything better at this certain moment. Ideally, you should buy horses with confidence!
Racing Horses
Especially in the first months, the game may seem boring or you might not see any progress because your horses do not race that often. You end up spending most of the time waiting for your few horses to hit the track. But I promise you, it will get better! The real fun comes with more horses. More horses come with money and money comes with time and patience!
Retiring Horses
The term patience also applies to retiring you horses as well. If a horse does not perform as hoped, give him or her another chance! I formulated some rules for myself to prevent ending up retiring horses out of a bad mood or better, out of impatience. My horses only face retirement, If they did not earn money in their last three or four starts. Our horses do have ups and downs as well! I owned several geldings who finished three times not of the money ranks but managed to win some races afterwards.
The same rule applies to my fillies. Other players may follow other strategies, but for me, mine works well too: I race my fillies as long as possible. I usually retire them at the age of 4 or 5, even if they have the breeding shed comment.
Breeding Horses
You need to be patient in the breeding game as well. Or better, especially be patient in the breeding game! If you begin your simhorseracing-journey at the first weeks of an in-game year, you have to wait two game years to see your home-breds race. This means over half a year in real life terms which is a really long time. Or at least it may seem so as a beginner. I've been there and it still does. Waiting for the so called Festivus is always a hard time, but we are getting closer!
And to support our patience, here are two quotes/sayings that may help you to wait.
One of my German favourites: Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude, or in English: Anticipation is the greatest joy (I do not know if this is a saying as well, I just translated the German one :D)
"And sure enough, even waiting will end... if you just wait long enough" ~William Faulkner
And with that, happy waiting!
~Julia