A BIT OF A HEADSCRATCHER?

[The Harlequins]

With the new gallop ratings coming into play.

Will anybody be brave enough to name there horse/horses before wk6.....yearlings that is

[Stormy Peak]

Sure I will, why break a long tradition of putting Awesome names on what turn out to be crappy horses :p

Stormy

[Garret Folsom]

Every horse I own gets named when it's bred. If it's a bad horse with a good name, I will eventually release the name for reuse.

[Shannon Hunt]

I've named several foals already. I expect them to be terrible, so either they will live up to expectations, or surpass them. Either way, my life is disappointment-free.

[Kent Saunders]

No reason to wait until wk 6. Yearlings can still be galloped for the first time on Festivus day, which is the day after the season changes. Not sure of the timing of the gallop adjustments but either it will be at season change or midnight that night when Festivus commences

[Kelly Haggerty]

All mine are named but the names aren’t anything I’ll mourn over. My expectations are not super high, hoping for maybe 1-2 allowance horses.

[The Harlequins]

Kent ,i was thinking.......workout times will rule as to future ability ?

[LA Pepper]

I dont know how you all keep track of your yearlings without a name ??? Numbers are too confusing. In the world of real horses , the ones with neat names get the most attention. Just look at 'Stud Muffin's' and 'Notacatbutallama's' lives.

[Kent Saunders]

Yep...at the end of the day workout times for younger horses rule. A horse that can run 3f on the dirt at 35 flat is still a horse that can run 35 flat no matter what it gallops. I don't name horses at all until they have worked a few times and given me a glimpse of their ability. And yes I know they don't always race to their workouts but after they start racing I never look back to how they worked. If fact I generally don't regularly check the gallops (after they start racing) and have been known to put poorly performing stakes gallopers in Claimers and didn't realize I did it till later. Fillies/Mares are the exception before I enter one in a claiming race.

[Stormy Peak]

It's also pretty easy to take an awesome name off of a yearling 'different career' and give it to a freak : ) Costs $10,000 to rename the two but hopefully, the freak will easily earn that money back and do so with a great name.

I think I've had the name Billy Jack on 3 horses now...eventually, I'll get a male stakes or freak that will get that name.
My first 'Billy Jack' was named in Year 23. I almost named Mal, Billy Jack, but given he was 1/2 to Roughian, I thought the name Mal worked better, as 'bad siblings' would be cool, and in the movies, Billy Jack is a hero, not a bad guy. : )
I've had 2 horses named Mal, the first one was named in Year 30, he was a QH that won for me $118,540

I sure loved those movies back then...especially Born Losers and Billy Jack. The rest in that series were not quite as good as the first two.

Stormy

[Brad Fabman]

Naming horses is not a high priority for me. Often I don't even get around to it until they are just about ready to race. I try not to sweat the small stuff but naming horses overall is just a pain in the............

[Paul Sellers]

there

*their

[Mr. Lord Rich]

there

*their

They’re

[Garret Folsom]

there

*their

They’re

Thur

[Michael Looker]

I dont know how you all keep track of your yearlings without a name ??? Numbers are too confusing.

I tend to breed foals in groups by division, with all of my mares in a division getting matings picked out, then being booked, then all bred immediately one after the other with 3-5 second gaps between them. With the way default foal names used to work, doing this would give all of the foals bred together very similar names (you might even get consecutive numbers, so "Horse Abcdef3496", "Horse Abcdef3497", and so on. In this case I can look at a list of my horses and know that "Horse AbcdefXXXX" are my Appy Sprinters, and can tell each foal apart by the last four digits (so I don't see their names as a string of long numbers, I just see "Mr. Thirty-four Ninety-six" and "Miss Thirty-four Ninety-seven"). I might not even need the "Thirty-four" part; the last two digits were usually enough to keep track of who was who.

Nowadays the default naming has changed. At the deadline for breeding season (when I do most of my breeding) two years ago, all of the foals I bred were "Horse 15804xxxxx". Last year when breeding my now-yearlings at the same time, the naming had changed such that the initial "1" was left off and every foals had two extra digits at the end (for a total of 11 instead of the previous 10). This means that horses bred seconds apart, instead of having names a digit or two apart, have names with a difference of 200 or so.

Under the naming rules from two years ago, the first five appy sprinting foals I bred last year would've been Horse 1590519835, Horse 1590519845, Horse 1590519847, Horse 1590519849, and Horse 1590519851. Instead they are Horse 59051983534, Horse 59051984548, Horse 59051984758, Horse 59051984932, and Horse 59051985132.

Interestingly (he says, as if ANY of this is interesting to anyone other than himself) twins don't both follow the new naming convention of "Horse then eleven digits". One does, while the other has the old convention of "Horse then ten digits then a T". So I have twins in my barn who aren't one after the other alphabetically; one is Horse 59066269319 while the other is Horse 1590662693T.

I don't know why the default naming rules changed, but hopefully it was for an important "make the SIM work better" reason to make up for the fact it makes keeping track of unnamed horses a lot trickier.