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SIM Success - Are We Having Fun Yet?
Original article written by Regina Moore posted 12 years 4 weeks agoI started SIM the last six weeks of Year 23, and Year 30 will be the completion of my seventh full game year. That translates into 2.5 real-life calendar years.
From the very beginning, playing SIM was the most fun I’d had in quite a while. Now, all this time later, I’m having even more fun than I did when I started. And, no, it’s not because I’ve won a Triple Crown race or anything like that. I’ve never even had a horse earn as much as $700,000. But I’ve had a lot of other fantastically nice things happen along the way. Things that keep SIM amazingly fun.
If you’re a newish player, or not so new but feel you’re struggling and facing impossible odds of ever being successful, maybe you can take something away from the following advice on how to keep your enthusiasm strong for SIM.
APPRECIATE THE SMALL SUCCESSES
The smartest decision I ever made in SIM happened my very first day. After clicking around a while, it became apparent that SIM was the type of game where it could take quite a while to build a stable to compete at the higher levels. I was starting with a mere $100,000 (newbies now get a total of $250,000, in increments), and I saw players with bankrolls in the tens of millions. How would I ever be able to “catch up” to where they were?
I therefore made a Conscious Decision to accept the fact that being successful in SIM was going to require patience and take a certain amount of time. I decided that I was going to enjoy smelling the roses along the way, and not get upset that I wasn’t a top tier player right out of the box. I was going to be content with the task of establishing the building blocks of a strong stable, and not insist that the most exciting experiences had to happen all at once.
As a result of that initial decision, I got a buzz out of every little milestone: The first win. The first stakes win. The first horse to win two races in a row. The first horse to earn $100,000. The first horse to ever get claimed from me. The first graded stakes victory. The first homebred to win a race. And so on. It’s easy to be happy when every forward step is viewed as a success.
Just this past week, I got my first random $10,000 earnings from a pensioned horse that was an eventer. I’ve had pensioned horses competing in competitions for two years now. Never won a single cent from them. Then, suddenly, I get $10,000 (not that my 10 million bankroll needed the money) because one of my boys came up randomly in the computer. Cool!
HOW YOU PLAY NEEDS TO MATCH YOUR GOALS
Players want all sorts of different things from SIM, and play the game all sorts of different ways. What is sometimes a mismatch is when a player’s actions in SIM are at odds with their goal.
Some examples of this:
1. You want a lot of action – ie, lots of horses racing – but you’re upset that your win percent is so low. Guess what? The more horses you have racing, the more races you’re going to lose. If winning a high percent of races is more important than winning lots of money (the latter of which happens easier with a larger stable), then you need to get your stable small enough so that it only has your higher quality horses. If you’d rather have more action and lots of horses racing, then why complain about how bad your win percent is? Quantity versus quality is a trade-off. Only you can decide which is more important.
2. You decided right out of the box that your emphasis is going to be on breeding, and you’re all depressed because you’re constantly worried about having enough money for stud fees and to buy better mares. Newsflash: If you focus on breeding before getting a steady, dependable income flowing in, then you’re going to always be broke. (Buying mares does not bring in an income. Paying stud fees does not being in an income. Having a barn full of foals, and then yearlings, does not bring in an income.) Decide to live with being broke and barely scraping by, or else shelve breeding as a serious goal until you’ve got a bankroll with a lot of cushion. It’s a mismatch to focus primarily on breeding as soon as your six weeks is up, and then be all affronted and depressed that you never have any money.
3. Your goal is to acquire a high quality racehorses, and you happen to luck into a Steward-bred at auction on an underbid. So, you decide to re-sell that horse for a huge profit so you can have a big influx of money. Great! But why are you complaining that you never seem to have any good horses? If your goal is to have a good horse, then you need to hang onto such a horse when you’re fortunate enough to have one come your way. Why the left turn to suddenly deciding the money is more important?
From my first week in SIM, I knew I wanted to play all the breeds, and all types of Thoroughbreds in SIM. Therefore, it was enormously satisfying each of the last two games years when I had a stakes winner in all eight breeds (counting steeplechasers as a separate breed). Really, what greater accomplishment could there be for a jack-of-all-trades style of play? Therefore, it would be pretty silly of me to be moaning over the fact that I’ve never had a starter in a Triple Crown race. My emphasis has been on having my success spread out over every conceivable facet of SIM, not on winning a particular race.
So, if you have a goal in mind, make sure the way you’re playing SIM is a complement to that goal, and not at odds with it. Mismatches between goals and style of play makes for unhappy players.
LEARN HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR HORSES
If you’re a newish player, you’ve most likely got a lot of ordinary and downright bad horses in your barn. It’s going to take some time to build up your bank balance so you can gradually begin to acquire better horses. In the meantime, why not get the most out of the horses you have, rather than being depressed about not yet having any really good horses?
If one is willing to make the effort, it’s amazing the little nuances that can help your horses earn more, if not necessarily win more races. When you’re aware of those nuances, you can have successes similar to what I’ve had. Just a few examples:
1. An Appaloosa “hard to tell” galloper win a SIMMY award for best three-year-old male in his breed. Why? Because I was careful to keep him against 3yos and not race him against older horses, once he showed he couldn’t handle the latter.
2. A 3yo Appaloosa “stiff and awkward” galloper that currently has a 10:-0-1-2 record, but has earnings of over $24,000. Why so high earnings for a supposedly worthless horse? Because I’m very careful about placing him in races with small fields, and especially stakes races to take advantage of the money that’s there for the taking. Yes, my 10 million bankroll can do without the 24k, but it’s sure gratifying to get that income from a horse that Mary Weather suggests should be in a different career.
3. An 8yo Thoroughbred turf router that I bought at auction two years ago for a mere $4,000 from a successful barn. He had career earnings over 200k as a 6yo when at auction, and the key here was knowing that players with money are focused on purchasing breeding stock from other major players. Geldings and older uncut horses with less than seven figure earnings are completely overlooked. So, I got this guy for 4k, and he has earned some 275k for me, and has won two claiming races this year at age of eight, and most recently was second in a lucrative Grade 2 stakes. It’s all about paying attention and being open to opportunity, especially when everyone else’s attention is diverted elsewhere.
If you’re a player with “Intermediate” status, know that there’s quite a number of races, week after week, being sponsored by Intermediate players, and restricted to Intermediate players, that have hardly any entries. If you regularly do a Search on such races and enter in them, you can be earning a lot of money with your ordinary horses.
I’ve written a number of articles on how to get the most out of less-than-stellar horses, and some are those articles are still available under the Feature Race section. In short, there’s a ton of money available in SIM that never gets earned because there’s so few runners in many of the races, and a ton of very ordinary horses that could be earning more, if only their owners were willing to pay attention to what’s available, and take advantage of it.
KNOW THAT SIM HAS A GREAT ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
SIM is always changing and evolving. It doesn’t allow players to get too settled in their ways. It doesn’t allow for stagnation, because there’s always new things to think about and adapt to. The changes that have taken place in the 2.5 years that I’ve been playing have been mind-boggling in their scope – and that’s just the changes I can remember off the top of my head. Just a few examples: when I started, there were no such thing as gallops or the other training tools (one could only give a workout to train). There was no cheap Alaska circuit on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There wasn’t a Steward’s Cup for mixed breeds or All Weather horses. The splitting of over-filled races did not exist.
In addition to changes that affect how one strategizes their style of play, there’s also continuous ongoing changes that just plain make SIM life easier. When I started, you couldn’t sort the sales list (or hardly any list) by price or any other column. The Stud Book didn’t have rankings. You could only see your racing stats for the current year. There were no visible breeder stats. There were no summary stats at the bottom of one’s daily results page.
I tend to do my breeding of 100 or so mares all in one swoop at the end of season. That’s a lot of intense focus crammed into a short period of time. At one point last year, I’d created a foal, and then immediately realized that instead of breeding my turf miler mare to a turf miler stallion, I’d accidentally selected the name just above the chosen stallion, alphabetically, and so the foal was by a dirt sprinter. I was appalled that I’d made a grave error like that. The foal was completely worthless. What to do? I could suffer in silence and feel lousy about it. I could get on the Forum and announce my faux pas and try to drum up lots of sympathy from fellow players – not that it would change anything. Or, I could use the “Contact Us” button at the bottom of all SIM screens and ask The Steward if she’d be willing to correct my obviously unintentional error. I chose the latter. In less than 120 seconds, I had a reply back that said, “All fixed.” Sure enough, my foal was now by the stallion I’d intended to breed the mare to.
However you might feel about any particular change or “improvement”, don’t think for a minute that those who make SIM operate are indifferent or uncaring about how much fun players are having, how challenged players are feeling, how balanced the game play is while not hurting players that have already earned great success.
Admire highly successful players like Eric Nalbone and Laura Ferguson all you want. But don’t get so envious of others’ success that you forget the tremendous amount of fun and forward progress you can be having with your own current level of play.
Playing SIM can be an ongoing blast. I speak from experience.