Mixer purses

[Tom Lin]

Maybe I'm late to have noticed this and it has been mentioned elsewhere, but did the mixers really need another purse cut? I see the claimers race for $10K now instead of the usual $15K. What would ever be the incentive to claim any horse over $25K when the best you might hope for is to break even.
It wasn't long ago that the stakes races took a major cut and now the claimers. You already have "stakes" and "allowance" horses filling the claimers as it is. Why would you race anything worse than allowance when you have little chance to break even.
I can't imagine that mixers are responsible for the state of the SIM economy. If you look at top four purse earning trainers for Y58, I don't believe those trainers were heavily invested in mixer claimers. The players who are heavily involved in the claim game (which I am not one) will find quite a hit to their bank balance. I feel this just makes it harder for an up and comer. I can adjust, maybe they can't.
Just curious.

[Greg Czechowicz]

I agree I dont like this change one bit, have no idea why purses were lowered.

[Tammy Stawicki]

I get it on one level. I always found it problematic that claiming purses were higher than a number of the allowance purses out there. I ran a lot of horses through the years in claimers not because I felt they belonged there but because they could make more money there than in the allowance races they likely belonged in and no one was going to claim a gelding for 45 or 80k. Also was always frustrating that my nice allowance type fillies I didn't want lost through claimers were being out earned by my 3k/16k claimer geldings. So I'm happy that was finally addressed but certainly would have been happier to see it addressed with redistribution of purses rather than a unilateral cut. Say upping NW races to 15k instead of the 10-12 they are currently. I could also see an argument for tiered claimer purses where the 3/16k races have 10k purses but the higher ones are in the 12-15 range.

[Andrew Chillin]

I’m seeing more 8 and 9k purses in the lower claimers. Pretty sure there’s still plenty of those 10k and 15k purses

[Brad Fabman]

Bad move cutting mixer purses. Mixer purses are not creating money problems in the game. Thoroughbred purses are. They race for literally millions while people like myself who race primarily mixers are racing for peanuts. When the purses were $15,000 we were not even remotely getting rich. There was no reason whatsoever to cut these purses to $10,000. For me, you just barked up the wrong tree. I'm going to let this season play out and see how it affects the bottom line. Then I may have a decision to make. This obsession with removing money and points and whatever is really becoming a buzzkill. The target audience should be the players with millions and millions of dollars yet all these changes are just putting the squeeze on little guys like myself. Not affecting the big money players at all.

[Maria Schreuder]

I was very disappointed when I saw this as these races were a huge part of my bread and butter as a newer player largely reliant on running claimers in volume for my earnings. Early on I branched into mixer claimers to not be reliant on Trial Park alone and maximize all potential income streams, and this past season I bred a lot of foals expecting that the ones who couldn't cut it in the upper echelons would have claiming races to turn to. I'm still trying to rethink things now.

[Jurgen Ver]

I am also very disappointed to see this. I only race mixers and trotters. When i see the big differences in purses between the TB divisions and the mixers, then I think the big earners are not the mixers...
The top active earner in TB is around $7.9milj. In the mixer division is the higest earner an QH with $2.6milj, the paints and Appy are just $1.3milj and 1.6 milj. Trotters highest active earner is around $2.2milj, pacer $1.6milj.
So i don't think that te moneyproblem is not to find in the mixers divison.

IMO there can be a differance between TB purses and Mixer purses, but the differance is to big. Cutting the claiming purses is 1 thing, but the graded stakes (and normal stakesraces) are also a big problem. In TB division you have mostly every week 1 chance (or more) to enter a graded race, in mixers divisions there are just a couple graded stakes races a season. Mixer trainers need to pay to add stakes races to raise the eanings for there horses.

I hope there will be an adjustment.

[Randall Allen]

Mixer purses are not creating money problems in the game. Thoroughbred purses are. They race for literally millions

Agree 100 percent. You have a 5 million dollar Australian stakes purse for turf sprinters, an obnoxious amount that is way above even the Steward's Cup purse. There has been an ongoing trend that the thoroughbred horses have to earn more and more and more. A million dollar earning TB when I started was super awesome, then a 5 million earner was the new hot thing and the million dollar ones were just meh. Nowadays, a 5 million earner is sort of meh and the goal is to get lots of horses earning 10 million. In five sim years or so, 20 million will be the new bar...when does it end?

We can't just let the great, once in a lifetime ones (like Sidney and Happy Snowman) be that. They have to get overshadowed by everything now.

[Danny Derby]

I’m not going to do this for each mixer division, but here’s the Paint stakes schedule in real life. I’d say the SIM version is far more generous.

https://apha.com/racing/calendar/stakes-calendar/

[Savina Lazaki]

Come on now... I did a search of current entries at Odessa Park, and there are 363 races in weeks 1 & 2 presently. If we assume that's typical, then cutting purses by a third for the nearly 3000 races that track will host this year saves the economy about $14.5 mil. That's even more than what the sale of this single horse took out of the game in the last steward auction:

https://www.simhorseracing.com/horse.ph ... ID=1424994

[Shannon Hunt]

Come on now... I did a search of current entries at Odessa Park, and there are 363 races in weeks 1 & 2 presently. If we assume that's typical, then cutting purses by a third for the nearly 3000 races that track will host this year saves the economy about $14.5 mil. That's even more than what the sale of this single horse took out of the game in the last steward auction:

https://www.simhorseracing.com/horse.ph ... ID=1424994

I think the issue is that this throttles purses which are already comparatively low, in comparatively "poor" divisions, popular among players who run them for bread-and-butter income. For comparison, if you look at week 16d5 worldwide, just that day, just TR, just G1 races for three year olds and up, not counting the filly-only races, you have purses for 9.5 million total, purses which most players are not going to have access to in any way unless they already have significantly good horses and the cash reserves they've already earned/the prior reserves likely required to produce the horses. Again, that doesn't include filly-only races, two year olds, or other stakes below G1, in one day. I don't mean this as an "eat the rich" rant, I know people have put a lot of work into elite horses and purses should reflect that; heck I profited quite a bit from the good horses being split up among so many top-tier races since I could sneak into one with a weaker field then. Just putting into perspective why bread-and-butter mixer trainers may be feeling a bit trod upon when there are plenty of other places where cuts could be made where the impact wouldn't be felt as much.

Attractive claimer purses encourage people (not all people, but enough people) to run their slightly better horses in claimers instead of farting around in 4th-5th place in allowance races, stimulating the claimer market and giving more people the opportunity to pick up something nice if they're smart about it. The cheaper the purse, the less incentive to enter, the more claimers become a slog of garbage rather than an active marketplace.

[Savina Lazaki]

My earlier post was meant to be sardonic.

I just realized the potential of the cheap mixer claimers at the end of last year, and claimed a bunch out of week 15 and 16 races. Since they're now circling back to the track this year, I'll never really feel the difference this change makes, but I sure wouldn't mind having access to the 50% greater potential profits I thought I'd be competing for when I did the legwork to get into it.

That being said, I probably still would have started dabbling in cheap mixers, but ya know, there it is anyway.

[Shannon Hunt]

My earlier post was meant to be sardonic.

I just realized the potential of the cheap mixer claimers at the end of last year, and claimed a bunch out of week 15 and 16 races. Since they're now circling back to the track this year, I'll never really feel the difference this change makes, but I sure wouldn't mind having access to the 50% greater potential profits I thought I'd be competing for when I did the legwork to get into it.

That being said, I probably still would have started dabbling in cheap mixers, but ya know, there it is anyway.

My bad, I'm not great at reading text tone

[Kent Saunders]

At a minimum there should have been tiers. No way should an $80k claimer have the same purse as a $3k claimer. Would have been nice to get some communication prior as well

[Tom Lin]

Attractive claimer purses encourage people (not all people, but enough people) to run their slightly better horses in claimers instead of farting around in 4th-5th place in allowance races, stimulating the claimer market and giving more people the opportunity to pick up something nice if they're smart about it. The cheaper the purse, the less incentive to enter, the more claimers become a slog of garbage rather than an active marketplace.

Absolutely one of my initial points.