Playing the Match Game to Earn Easy Purse Money

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 13 years 4 weeks ago

For most SIMsters, it’s a gradual journey to financial freedom and having horses good enough to earn some real dollars. In the meantime, here’s one method of proactively earning purse money with minimal investment.

FACT 1: At any point in time, there are hundreds of racehorses available for sale, and that’s not even counting the sales list just for newbies. A lot of these horses are priced very low, since they usually aren’t very good, and some can even be had for a mere dollar.

FACT 2: There are many thousands of dollars in purse money that goes unclaimed every racing night. This is because of small fields where there aren’t enough horses to receive all the money, which is distributed back to fifth place. Some races have no entries at all. If you don’t have any appropriate horses in your barn that meet the conditions of those races, you might think there’s no way you can get at that purse money. But there is. You can buy a cheap horse off the sales list.

MATCH UP FACT 1 WITH FACT 2: Buy cheap horses from the sales list and enter in immediate races that have just a horse or two entered, or no entries at all.

RESULT: Quick and easy purse money.


Here’s a method for going about doing this.

STEP ONE: Find a Race (or two or three or four…)

A day or two before race day, go the Search page and click the “Unfilled” box on the Status line on the right side. Click the “Show Entries/Results” box near the bottom of the right side. You’ll get a listing of all races in the entire SIM that have three or fewer entries for the next two weeks. The list will be chronological by date, and all the tracks with unfilled races for that date will appear alphabetically.

Let’s say it’s a Thursday. The races for Friday will be showing first, and that’s what you want to focus on. Say there’s a 5f turf race at South Africa, sponsored by a player, for 3yo maiden fillies that were bred in South Africa. It has a 25k purse and there’s one filly entered. So, if you enter a horse, you’ll at least finish second and earn $5500 (22%). You might even win and earn $12,500 (50%).


STEP TWO: Go to the Sales List

You’re looking for a 3yo filly that’s still a maiden, bred in South Africa. Filter the sales list by Females, and then by 3yos. That’ll give you all the 3yo fillies available for sale. Now click the “Bred” heading at the top of the second column, so it’ll sort alphabetically. Go down the list until you find “SAF” which will indicate fillies bred in South Africa. If you don’t find any, you’re done and will have to find a different race to work with. Ditto if any SAF-bred fillies are already winners.

You want the filly to be cheap, as in $2500 or less. If you pay more – say, $5000 -- and finish second, then you’re really not doing much better than breaking even, and perhaps even losing some when you consider shipping costs. What would be ideal is if you can find a 3yo SAF-bred maiden filly that only costs a dollar.

Hopefully, one of the available SAF-bred cheap fillies is bred for turf sprinting. But if you’re racing to finish second in a two-horse race, then it really doesn’t matter what she is. She’s going to be second and get $5500. So, you can buy a dirt route filly and she’ll still receive the same $5500.

Hopefully, you’ve found a filly, and perhaps more than one. How do you decide whether you should actually buy any of them; and if so, which one? Here’s some factors to consider, not necessarily in this order:

a. The cheaper she is, the bigger your profit will be after the race. You want to weigh the purchase price against the least amount you’ll earn from the race, plus shipping cost considerations.

b. The better her race record (for turf sprinting, in this example), the more likely she’ll win the race rather than be second, and the better resale value she’ll have. But if she has a decent record, she probably isn’t very cheap. The idea is to buy a super cheap horse because you might be running her for just one race. So, it’s fine if her record is currently 6-0-0-0. But if you can find one for the same price that’s 4-0-0-1, all the better.

c. Where is she stabled right now? The closer she is to South Africa (for this example), the better. If she’s in Hawaii, that’s going to be quite a long and expensive ship. Of course, even if she’s tired from a long ship, she’s still going to pick up that $5500 for finishing second in a two-horse race. But it’s always better to have a short ship to a race than a long one.

d. How long since her last race? If she’s raced within the past 7 days, I’d forget about her. You want her to have at least two weeks’ rest since her last race. (If it were me, I’d take a chance on only 7-10 days’ rest, but if you’re short on cash, you probably don’t want to risk the cost of injury.)

e. Is she still an active racehorse? If you’re talking about a filly or mare, make sure she hasn’t already been retired. (Sidenote: If you find a cheap colt for a race for colts and geldings, remember you can always earn $1000 by immediately gelding it.)


STEP THREE: Buy-Enter-Ship
If you’ve decided to purchase a filly for the race, push the “buy” button. Now that she’s yours, enter her in the race. Immediately ship her to the track, so she can get there as quickly as possible.


WORST CASE SCENARIO
The worst thing that can happen is that, in the hours between when you bought the filly and the deadline for entries, some other horses enter, so suddenly your new filly isn’t guaranteed to earn second place purse money, and now it’s race day and too late to scratch. Hopefully, you paid minimally for the filly and the ship. But also bear in mind, horses entered at the eleventh hour might be shipping a long distance at the last minute, so they might be very tired horses and can finish behind your filly for that reason. In other words, they probably aren’t ideal candidates for the race. (Also, AJ, the computer, might enter a horse or two. Don't worry -- you're pretty much guaranteed to beat them.)


In this example, if you paid $500 for your new filly and spent $500 shipping her, then you have $1000 invested. If she finishes second and earns $5500, you’ve made a profit of $4500 in less than two days. If she happens to win, you’ve made a profit of $11,500.

Now what? Perhaps you bought a really horrid filly, and now that you’ve profited a few thousand from her, you don’t want her anymore. You can try selling her cheap, try to get her claimed in Alaska, or you can send her to Greener Pastures.

If our example filly lost the race, you might want to hang onto her. There’s usually plenty of maiden races around with small fields. You can keep running her and picking up purse money until she finally wins. There might even be some other SAF-bred races sponsored every now and then. (Or, if you have the game points, you can sponsor one yourself for her next start.)

The above is just one example of how to buy a horse for short-term purse money. You can repeat this scenario over and over again.


Some further pointers:

Maiden races are far and away the ones most likely to have few entries, especially as the year progresses. If you’re eager to make money, it rarely makes sense to dump a maiden, because the older that horse gets, the fewer horses it's going to be running against. Maiden races for 4yo+ sometimes have no entries at all. In short, the horse is probably going to win eventually.

You can find stakes races with few entries and can earn more money in a small stakes field. But stakes races always have entry fees, so it’s going to cost more than just the ship to run.

Stakes races restricted to horses bred in a specific region or country can have very small, inferior fields, so they can sometimes be good places to earn decent money quickly. For one recent 75k IRE-bred race, a filly of mine was the lone entrant. So, I bought another IRE-bred filly off the sales page for 5k to provide some competition. I walked away with $54,000 in combined first and second place money for a two-horse stakes race. It’s unfortunate that the $7500 for third, $5250 for fourth, and $1500 for fifth was thoroughly wasted, considering there's lots of players in SIM that wish they had more money.

Paints and Appaloosas are the breeds with the fewest horses, and therefore the overall fewest entries in races. I’ve had more than my share of deadbeat color breed horses run fourth of four in stakes and earn a few thousand each time. That kind of money can be a reason to hang onto a marginal horse for longer than just one race.

There’s always racehorses available for sale cheap. And there’s always races with few, if any, horses entered. Match up those horses with those races and make some easy money.

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