Buying Horses

[The Steward]

Buying Horses

There are usually several hundred horses for sale at any given point in time, though this number can fluctuate up and down from day to day and week to week. To get a list of these horses, click "Buy Horses" from any one of your barns or stable office.

A list of horses, displayed 500 at a time, will appear. This list can be daunting, but take the time to click on a few horse names and explore the horse pages that appear. You’ll see the horse’s name, physical information (color, gender, age, height), race record, pedigree (mother [the horse’s ‘dam’] and father [the horse’s ‘sire’]), and race descriptions, detailing the information about each race that the horse has run in its racing career. You’ll also see a button on the horse page that says “I Want To Buy This Horse.” Do not click this until you are absolutely sure you want to purchase the horse, as clicking the button will move the horse into your stable, subtract the money from your bank account, and remove the horse from the sale page, thus giving you ownership of the horse.

“There are so many horses to choose from, how do I know what horses are any good?”

Given that the objective of the game is to win races with your horses, a good horse would be any horse that can win races with reasonable consistency. Horses of this caliber are sometimes difficult to find on the sale page, and are generally of a relatively low quality, but many talented horses often get overlooked and can be found on the sale page. Few horses on the sales page have won a race, but you should be looking for horses with relatively little race experience (between 0 and 3 starts) who have managed to finish 5th or better one or more times. They should generally be between the ages of 2 and 5, though there are occasionally instances in which a player may buy a “yearling,” or 1-year old horse, or an older horse off of the sales page.

The horse’s parents are often the biggest clues as to the capabilities of a horse, so you should be looking for horses sired by stallions who either earned significant amounts of money on the racetrack ($1,000,000+) or stand for reasonable stud fees and have a large number of foals ($10,000 stud fee or at least 5-10 foals, preferably foals that have performed well on the racetrack!). If you can find a horse on the sales page whose mother is a stakes winner, this is an even better predictor of talent in the foal.

Select a few horses that meet as many of these criteria as possible, and then click the button to buy the horse. This button can be found either next to the horse’s name in the long listing on the sale page, or in a button below the horse’s information on its’ individual page.

What should I look for when buying a horse?
When buying a horse, you should consider many things. One of course is price. If you are a new player starting out, it is debateable whether it is better to look for one classy high priced horse or many low level horses. Always keep in mind that you will have to pay for shipping and board on all the horses you buy, so leave money in your account for that.

One thing to look for is if a horse has run very badly say going short, you might pick the horse up and try him going long. Likewise, if the horse has only run on dirt and run poorly, he may need turf or all weather.

Also, some horses do better as older horses; if they are given up on as a younger horse and their parents ran well at ages 4 and 5, you might want to try them as well.

Look for sires who were classy, and preferably the dam sire will be good as well. Very rarely do horses with stakes winning dams come onto the sales page, so don't worry about the class of the dam. Also, it is wise to look for horses where both parents liked the same thing, such as going long on the dirt, instead of one parent liking dirt routes and one liking turf sprints.

How do I make money with these horses?

With horses who have potential you will want to place them in races that suit their needs. However, a vast majority of new players make a lot of money with "stakes fillers," which is a kind of horse that you place in a stakes race with only 3 or 4 horses, as prize money goes down to 5th place. 5th place in a maiden race typically bring $100 - $900, and 5th place in a stakes race brings typically around $2,000 or more.

There is a moral question surrounding this act, as after a few times of doing this the horse is likely ruined and will perform worse every time. The damage might be undone after a long rest.