New Players and Breeding - The Most Important Thing

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 13 years 3 weeks ago

So, your six weeks are up, and now you’re a newbie who is able to, finally, breed your own horses. The breeding aspect of SIM is what players are usually most eager to undertake as quickly as possible. Welcome aboard!

I know it’s not going to do much good to tell you to put on the brakes and try to think this new endeavor through first. But with this series of three articles, I am going to try to encourage you to be heads-up about breeding, especially in terms of finances, while indulging your eagerness and excitement.

A little background on this author. I’m in my sixth full game year in SIM. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly adept breeder. I’ve had about a 15% win clip since my first year in SIM, and that has held steady after I reached the point of the majority of my horses being homebreds. So, I neither improved nor harmed my overall quality of stock by breeding my own. What might make me a bit unique in SIM is that I participate – and breed – all distance categories in all breeds. More importantly for these articles, I look at finances with a much more critical eye than the average player, since I am a bookkeeper by trade.

What I’m *not* covering in these three articles is mare selection, or how to choose a stallion beyond researching the obvious crosses. For starters, I’d just be repeating the FAQs on breeding with the most general advice. (Please *do* read those FAQs before breeding your first mare.) It’s very difficult to give advice about a specific mare with generalities. If you need help with stallion selection, you can ask on the Forum, as there’s usually a few players who are willing to give advice about what kind of mate they would choose for that mare, or if they would even breed her at all.


THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
The most important thing to know about breeding, as it relates to finances, is that breeding is a money pit. It takes cash. There’s no income from breeding. You can have the best mare in the game (which is unlikely, if you’re a newbie) and breed her to the best stallion in the game, and that’s just going to cost you money – a lot of money, most likely, to acquire such a mare, and likely a lot of money for a high stud fee. The only way you *might* get cash is if you sell the offspring as a youngster. But you’ll probably find out in a hurry how little other players think of your breeding choices, and most likely the mare that you thought was so wonderful. In your eyes she’s a princess; in another player’s eyes, she might be a “why would someone bother breeding *that*” type of mare.

If the above offspring turns out to be a nice racehorse for you, it can earn purse money that might actually offset the cost of the mare and the stud fee. But let’s get real. The vast majority of horses – including those with supposedly great parents – are just average horses. That means, for Thoroughbreds, earning around 20k to 30k in their entire careers. And let’s not forget that a certain portion of anyone’s homebreds are going to be worse than average horses.

Which brings me to the most important point about breeding. You *must* have a steady, reliable income stream before you can be in a position to get serious about breeding in a big way. If you fell in love with the breeding aspect of SIM as soon as you joined, and are immediately thinking about how you need to acquire fillies, fillies, fillies, because you’re much more interested in breeding horses than racing horses... I can guarantee that you’re on permanent track to the poor house.

Want to know why players sell impressive youngsters rather than race them themselves? Sometimes, it’s because they need money for stud fees. They need stud fees to try to breed an outstanding horse, but as soon as it looks like they have a youngster that has a “wow” gallop and/or fast workout, they put it up for sell, so they can afford to pay for more stud fees to try to get another outstanding youngster. Quite an unsatisfying cycle, in my opinion, especially when the bank balance never grows over the long term. But that’s the quandary players get themselves into when they want to make breeding their SIM priority right out of the box. They never have enough money to support their breeding activities, and are always fighting the battle of the bank balance.

So, if you want the peace of steadily growing your bank balance, while still enjoying breeding horses, you need to establish a reliable income stream while starting out with breeding only a few mares. It doesn’t matter how you go about generating income, just that you have an ongoing source of money coming in. It could be from having a few stakes performers that always bring in purse money; it could be because you have a large stable of claiming horses that almost always earn a bite of the purse; it could be because you're adept at putting marginal horses in races with small fields so they always earn something; it could be because you’re committed to writing articles on a regular basis; it could be because you have a knack for marketing and are able to buy horses cheap off the sales list and resale them for much higher prices. Or a combination of these. Whatever. Just do what you need to do to get money coming in, so that your bank balance is overall climbing each passing week, rather than shrinking.

A point I want to make about purse earnings: It never ceases to amaze me how many SIMsters I come across who want absolutely nothing to do with geldings. No reproductive ability, no value. I couldn’t disagree more. The most reliable money horses in my stable, year after year after year, are the 4yo+ Thoroughbred geldings, because by that age group, I’ve weeded out the ordinary horses. Usually the long-term successful runners are routers or milers, but occasionally a sprinter can still be going strong beyond the age of four. When these horses can regularly, or just occasionally, be competitive in stakes races – even if they rarely win – they are pouring money into your bank account. And because there’s no motive to retire them, they can generate revenue for many years. Fillies can’t do that, because if you’ve got a filly – especially a good one -- you’re going to whisk her away to the breeding shed as soon as possible. And colts that are genuinely of high enough quality to stand stud (see the FAQs for the suggested minimum criteria) are just plain rare, and even more unlikely to fall into a new player’s hands. (You may think you’ve got yourself a genuine stud horse because your colt has won a few allowance races, and even took a stakes once at Trial Park. Trust me -- nobody’s interested. Except perhaps another newbie who is just as naïve.) Reliable geldings are the building blocks that are the key to the racing success of a new stable.

If breeding equals happiness in SIM, then having a steady income is what makes a lot of breeding possible.

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