Questions, Questions, Questions

Ara Davies · Post by **Ara Davies** » 16 years ago

I'm at 142 racehorses right now and I'm really happy at that. I try to keep no more than one page of 2yos, one page of 3yos, and one page of older horses. I get tired of entering if I have more than that, and it's a pain when you have a lot of horses in a particular division in a particular area. I do have more broodmares than that so I sell off a lot of foals each year (not as many as Eric does, though!)

Paul Heinrich · Post by **Paul Heinrich** » 16 years ago

I've found my comfort level pretty close to where Ara and Eric are, though my numbers are distributed a little bit differently. Since I don't have the clout (ie, neither the broodmare band nor the reputation) to operate a successful yearling sale or auction, I tend to hold on to more of my foals and eventually race them in claimers. I also give a lot of them away to new players, or put them on the sales page pretty cheap. Right now, I'm at 70 2yos, 35 3yos, and 33 older horses. I also have a crop of 118 yearlings (which I will try to get to 75 by the time they race).

There are people who have the patience to race 100+ 3yos and 100+ older horses. I really don't know what those people do for a living.

Lori Hamill · Post by **Lori Hamill** » 16 years ago

Great advice, thank you very much!

How in the world do you keep track of all of those horses????

Ara, is there a way to separate the horses so you can have the 2-year-olds. 3-year-olds etc. together? On my stable list the horses are listed in alphabetical order. It's a little confusing for me and I would love to be able to divide them. I'd really like to divide them by age or by surface preference. I was going to get a notebook together so I could do this.

Eric, thanks for telling me about the also eligibles, I didn't know that at all. I see "Race Full" and just skip over it. A very few of my horses have points but I may as well try to take advantage of it, if I can.

Eric & Scott, thank you, thank you, thank you about the heads up about earning money by writing articles. I was really worried that if I got down to no $$$ I would just have these horses sitting around in the stables not able to even afford to ship them to a race - and what fun is that?? At least I know that there are a few options for earning some bucks. I don't know how good I'd be at it but if I need to, I'll give it a try.

Right now, I'm not even curious about the breeding aspect, which is probably safer for me. I'll leave the breeding to the more knowledgeable people like all of you and I'll just be happy to buy the kids!

Laura Smith · Post by **Laura Smith** » 16 years ago

Many of us, myself included, use spreadsheets -- for myself, they're not so much for keeping track of surface/distance preference as for when and where the horse has been racing. I know I took a screenshot of my spreadsheet awhile ago to post in another thread -- I'll see if I can find it and post it again here.

[ETA: <a href='http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1621/1 ... 755838.jpg' target='_blank'>Okay, found it</a>. It's a few SIM years old, and I've changed it a little since then (i.e. I don't bother with the surface preference column anymore, etc.) but the idea is the same. Sorry the screen shot is so small... not sure why.]

I believe the separation of 2YOs, 3YOs, etc. in your stable is a SIMperior feature -- one of the many things that make SIMperior as indispensable to me as socks or my toothbrush.

Actually, I just had a thought. Check your PMs.

Ara Davies · Post by **Ara Davies** » 16 years ago

distortedhumor wrote:Ara, is there a way to separate the horses so you can have the 2-year-olds. 3-year-olds etc. together? On my stable list the horses are listed in alphabetical order. It's a little confusing for me and I would love to be able to divide them. I'd really like to divide them by age or by surface preference. I was going to get a notebook together so I could do this.

There is on mine but it's possible it's a SIMperior-only feature (I've been SIMperior so long I honestly don't know!). Just above the list of horses are a huge number of options: racehorses, steeplechasers, each age category, broodmares, bred mares, unbred mares, stallions, yearlings, foals, pensioned, for sale, reserved names, and each distance and surface category. If that really is only for SIMperiors that makes me even more sure I'd never drop SIMperior. I don't know how I'd function without it!

Lori Hamill · Post by **Lori Hamill** » 16 years ago

Thank you so much for the gift of a week of SIMperior, Laura!!! WOW!

There is a BIG difference between the regular screen and the SIMperior screen. I think I will be hooked and going for the SIMperior too! (Shame I didn't think of this yesterday when there was the sale on game points.) Thank you so much, Laura, it really opens a lot up for me.

I'm going to have to figure out the spread sheet thing too. That looked really cool. Thank you so much!

Eric Nalbone · Post by **Eric Nalbone** » 16 years ago

Yess... as it relates to spreadsheets, MS Excel and I have become best friends. We run my stable together. Sometimes I think Excel has more say on what happens in my stable than I do!

But in all seriousness, that spreadsheet tracks absolutely everything I do in the SIM. If horses/updates don't make it onto that sheet, I'll literally lose horses in my barn for weeks or years(!) at a time and stumble on them sometime in the future and have NO idea how a horse got into my barn or what I wanted to do with it.

Greentree Racing · Post by **Greentree Racing** » 16 years ago

I have made it incredibly complicated, lol.

I am using MS Access.

I have Tables:
1. Main horse DB: 779 horses (with assorted characteristics)
2. Race Times Table: for 779 horses
3. Workouts table: for 779 horses

Queries relating to the table(s): (working more on these. 779 horses broke up into these catagories):
1. Workouts:
a. Dirt milers
b. dirt routers
c. turf milers
d. turf routers
e. turf sprinters
f. any horse related to the horse in question within 5 gens (broken down into sires side & dam's side. Wrote in SQL & Visual BASIC).

2. Breeding:
a. Best Turf Sires (based on several characteristics. Will weight these in SPSS see below)
b. Breeding Comments
c. Slow Sires
d. Stewards Cup OTB
e. Offspring characteristics

3. Race Times:
a. Dirt Milers
b. Dirt Routers

Working on some more, then sticking the results into SPSS (A statistics package), to do "What If's" (Interpretive Statistics). Will take a few more weeks.

Did most of this on the SIM break.

I was a math minor, I love the mental exercise of this stuff, Sudoku is child's play, lol

But no one needs to do this. Without running in SPSS so far, I haven't seen anything other than you just need money (ie: breed the best to the best, assuming a normal distribution). Maybe SPSS will tell me more, on specifics.

I've heard the Stew is disinterested in statistics, but God bless her, she gives us numbers to play with!

Eric Nalbone · Post by **Eric Nalbone** » 16 years ago

Ramrod, you and I should talk... STATA is my statistical package of choice. And you're right - you'll find out things you already know intuitively!

Scott Eiland · Post by **Scott Eiland** » 16 years ago

Laura Smith wrote: I believe the separation of 2YOs, 3YOs, etc. in your stable is a SIMperior feature -- one of the many things that make SIMperior as indispensable to me as socks or my toothbrush.

Laura you rock. I was thinking the same thing, and yet saying something means more to me than socks isn't saying much since I go to work in my pajamas.

Rob Canterbury · Post by **Rob Canterbury** » 16 years ago

spss is old school....

as a graduate student I was responsible for writing a handbook for psych students to understand SPSS... they were not math students extraordinare.

Keep in mind SPSS hadn't even gone to a windows package so we had to input data OLD SCHOOL.

oh those were the days ANOVA's and all

Jolene Danner · Post by **Jolene Danner** » 16 years ago

you can separate 2yo's and 3yo's w/o having SIMperior. Its just the separation of routers, milers, sprinters etc tha'ts a SIMperior function.

Friedrich Barbarossa · Post by **Friedrich Barbarossa** » 16 years ago

Ramrod wrote:I have made it incredibly complicated, lol.

I am using MS Access.

I have Tables:
1. Main horse DB: 779 horses (with assorted characteristics)
2. Race Times Table: for 779 horses
3. Workouts table: for 779 horses

Queries relating to the table(s): (working more on these. 779 horses broke up into these catagories):
1. Workouts:
a. Dirt milers
b. dirt routers
c. turf milers
d. turf routers
e. turf sprinters
f. any horse related to the horse in question within 5 gens (broken down into sires side & dam's side. Wrote in SQL & Visual BASIC).

2. Breeding:
a. Best Turf Sires (based on several characteristics. Will weight these in SPSS see below)
b. Breeding Comments
c. Slow Sires
d. Stewards Cup OTB
e. Offspring characteristics

3. Race Times:
a. Dirt Milers
b. Dirt Routers

Working on some more, then sticking the results into SPSS (A statistics package), to do "What If's" (Interpretive Statistics). Will take a few more weeks.

Did most of this on the SIM break.

I was a math minor, I love the mental exercise of this stuff, Sudoku is child's play, lol

But no one needs to do this. Without running in SPSS so far, I haven't seen anything other than you just need money (ie: breed the best to the best, assuming a normal distribution). Maybe SPSS will tell me more, on specifics.

I've heard the Stew is disinterested in statistics, but God bless her, she gives us numbers to play with!

I'm obviously going to have to teach myself how to use Access, because if I could, you've basically just described in precise detail exactly what I want for my stable. For crying out loud it's like operating software for your stable. This is simply.....AWESOME.

I must have something like this.

Laura Smith · Post by **Laura Smith** » 16 years ago

Scott Eiland wrote:
Laura Smith wrote: I believe the separation of 2YOs, 3YOs, etc. in your stable is a SIMperior feature -- one of the many things that make SIMperior as indispensable to me as socks or my toothbrush.

Laura you rock. I was thinking the same thing, and yet saying something means more to me than socks isn't saying much since I go to work in my pajamas.

That is awesome. I, too, go everywhere possible in my pajamas. When I lived downtown next to a very large mall I once went Christmas shopping in pajamas with little horsies all over them.

Although I was wearing a winter coat, so I guess the other shoppers didn't get the full pajama experience. Not that I didn't get some strange looks, but that's par for the course for me, so I can't say for sure whether that was the pajamas or not.