Stud Management for Novices - The Right Stallion

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 12 years 2 weeks ago

So you’re a newish player and you’ve seen all these other players standing stallions. What a neat thought it is that, one day, your chance will come and you’ll have a horse worthy of standing at stud. There will be prestige from owning a quality horse that other players want to breed their mares to, the income from stud fees, reasons to post on the Forum how great your boy has been. Maybe, if you’re a SIMperior player, he’ll even get featured in The Edge newsletter, and even more players will flock to him, now that he has The Steward’s stamp of approval.

So, how do you start down this path to glory and riches?

First, know that new players can’t stand stallions. You have to be at least a junior player.

Obviously, the most important, and the most difficult thing, is to actually be fortunate enough to get your hands on an uncut racehorse worthy of standing stud. (Or be in a position to buy a stallion already standing.) The word “worthy” is open to interpretation. The only hard requirement of standing stud is that the horse had to have won one race. But the FAQs suggest the follow minimum requirements: 1. Should be a multiple graded stakes winner; 2. should have earned over $350,000; and 3. should have a nice family, with stakes winners on both sides.

If you have a boy or two in your barn that you’ve been thinking of retiring to stud, you’ll likely be surprised at just how difficult it is to meet even these most minimum suggested requirements. And don’t gloss over that word “minimum”. The Thoroughbred dirt/turf stud market is fiercely competitive. All you have to do is go to the Stud Book (available only to SIMperior players), pick a distance/surface type, sort the available stallions by earnings, and see how many have earned over a million dollars in their racing career. If you have a horse that’s earned, say, only 400k, he’s unlikely to even get noticed by mare owners, let alone receive a final nod as the choice of mate.

I have a Grade 1 winning turf sprinter that had ten wins and five seconds in seventeen starts, while racing mostly in stakes throughout a three-year career. He stands for an easy 15k. But his earnings are under 700k. In his first two crops, he’s only gotten a total of 22 mares, and half of those were owned by myself. There’s nothing “wrong” with him – The Steward has bred to him and gave him good kudos during the Steward’s Cup chat – but the fact is there’s a lot more young turf sprinters out there who appear more exciting, mainly because they have higher earnings. If my boy had got up for second in the Steward’s Cup, he would have seven figure earnings and I think that would have made a huge difference in his attractiveness. But he didn’t. And he’s never going to appear as impressive as those horses with the big dollar earnings. He retired as having the potential to be a B level “useful” stallion. He’ll need a blockbuster offspring to improve his status, and the chances of getting such from a limited mare pool are slim.

So, even when you’ve got the Grade 1 win, highly consistent race record, and strong pedigree, it doesn’t mean the mares are going to flock to your stallion. That’s how competitive the breeding market is. So, that’s something to consider when having fantasies of how wealthy you’ll get and the prestige you’ll enjoy when standing a stallion at stud, especially when it’s a stallion with, say, only a couple of Grade 3 wins to his credit and a few hundred thousand in earnings.

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