This is part 3 of our comprehensive beginners guide to Photo Finish Live. If you haven’t read part 1 you can do that here or you can read part 2 here.
If you’re up to date you should know the basics to the trainer horse and how we can use the trainer to learn how to race horses in the game for free. And you would have just learned about the two in-game currencies DERBY & $CROWN. And you may have even loaded up your in game wallet ready to buy your first horse.
If you haven’t created an account, now is the time to do it here. (Use code: HIDDEN)
Let’s jump into Part 3 now!
We’ll be using the actual first horse I bought as a case study. There are plenty of learnings to unpack so a heads up, this one is a bit longer.
MY FIRST HORSE: A CASE STUDY
So you’re ready to buy your first horse! That’s exciting. It’s time to choose which strategy you’d like to employ. We mentioned this in the last article but if you haven’t yet read the Guide To Buying Your First Horse it’s time to do that now.
I started the game with 16,000 DERBY and zero $CROWN and decided to employ strategy 2 – buying a cheap raceable colt.
I thought a budget of about 10,000 DERBY would be good for my first horse purchase and allow me with enough DERBY left over to use for paying race entry fees (about 5 races worth). I decided to find a 2 year old colt so I could race straight away & learn on the fly. I was prepared to lose my whole investment just to sink my teeth in, but knew a 2 year old has a very long run way of racing and a chance to earn back it’s investment over time.
At the time, 10,000 derby got me an entry level colt. But boy did i make a huge mistake! You’ll hear about that soon.
Introducing, The Mechanic. Purchased as a 2yo, this A grade colt originally had a Fleet Form Benchmark Rating of 49 and had 5 starts for zero places. Price: 10,395 DERBY or $130 USD.
Up until this point we haven’t explained a key part of the game. But it’s now time to unpack one of the most important features…
THE BLOODLINE
Just like real horse racing, a horses bloodline is immensely important. Horses when bred with one another pass on their genes to their offspring and in real horse racing having good blood can be extremely valuable. Just like real horse racing, the bloodlines of your Photo Finish horses are important too.
Before we dive into this we need to back track a bit, to the origins of the game. When the game was first created the original horses were derived from Photo Finish Live PFP’s. Like any NFT project the most valuable PFP’s were the 1/1’s. These carried the most potent genes, which is why you will see a lot of them in the bloodline (we’re about to break that down soon). The 1/1 PFP’s look like the below and you can learn more about them from this great video by NFTLeano.
1/1 PFP’s in the bloodline look like this. You will spot them from a mile away.
When PFP’s were bred they created the original Gen Zero Photo Finish Horses. Aside from 1/1 breeding, breeding with similar traits also produced horses with decent genes too. And both of these can make for very good racers.
Good Breeding: When a horse is bred well, with a good partner, and with complementing genes, it can create a great race horse. Of course part of the fun of the game is trying to breed the next superstar. There is no exact science to breeding although there are plenty of tips and tricks which we’ll save for a later day.
Inbreeding: This is bad breeding and involves a horse breeding with another horse that is from the same bloodline. Just like real horse racing, this isn’t ideal and is avoided at all costs. In the game, it’s the same and a horse is penalised if they are in-bread. That’s why 1/1 bloodlines are important as even though they can create good races you don’t want to inbreed. Any match of bloodlines within 4 generations will result in a negative penalty to the horses genes. Learn more about inbreeding here.
But what are a horses genes?
THE GENES
In the game the horses genes are called attributes. Every horse has these attributes and also a grade associated with each attribute. The average of all of the different attributes makes the overall grade of a horse. Remember that little letter in the circle next to the horses name?
Let’s break down the 6 attributes:
Start: This is how quickly a horse begins the race and jumps out of the race
Speed: The pace or speed of the horse after it gets into a stride.
Stamina: The ability of the horse to have sustained speed.
Finish: The ability of the horse to close off well and have speed in the later stages of the race.
Heart: The horses will to compete and run close to it’s opposition; it’s will to win.
Temper: The horses consistency. A well tempered horse won’t have too many off races where it performs below it’s ability.
This is an example of a retired horses attributes. This retired horse had an overall rating of S+ but as you can see the horse had SS and SS- attributes for Start & Speed.
Want to know the catch? You won’t know what letter grade your horse rates for each attribute until AFTER it is retired and can’t race any more.
COMPLEMENTING ATTRIBUTES
When looking for a horse, complementing attributes are good. These are easiest to remember by looking at the stats that sit directly next to each other. Usually when two stats side by side are it’s best attributes, it can give us a clue to what distance the horse may be best to run at.
High Start & High Speed = Higher chance of a better Sprinter or Short Distance horse (4, 5, 6f)
High Speed & High Stamina = Higher chance of a better Middle Distance horse (7, 8, 9f)
High Stamina & High Finish = Higher chance of a better Stayer or Long Distance horse (10, 11 & 12f)
Here’s the same attributes again.
ACTIVITY: Knowing what you know now what distance is the horse likely to be best at?
ANSWER: Remember SS is above S so Start & Speed are the highest two attributes. Therefore it’s likely this horse is a sprinter. This horse is called Ted Bezos and you can view it here.
Here is Ted’s Race results by Distance:
So as you can see Ted was in fact an excellent sprinter and earned an incredible 1,500,000+ $DERBY during his racing career. That equals $18,750 USD just from his racing career! Ted is now aged 5 and at stud, priced (as of May 24′) with a 55,555 DERBY stud breeding fee ($695 USD). If Ted was to breed the maximum 35 times he’d earn his owner over $24,000 each season (every 4 weeks)! But we’ll save breeding for another day.
Ok, now we’re going to put it all together and we’re going to analyse the bloodline of the first horse I bought, The Mechanic. It’s time to lower your expectations, because he is no Ted Bezos. By analysing the bloodline we can get some clues as to what attributes The Mechanic may have and what distances he may be best to run at.
ANALYSING THE MECHANIC’S BLOODLINE
It’s time to click on The Mechanic‘s “Bloodline” tab. This will show us the parents, grand parents, great grandparents and so on of the horse.
First let’s look at the Mechanic’s sire’s (Dad) bloodline:
Take a moment to analyse the above using everything you’ve learnt so far. Things to look at:
- Win & Place %
- Attributes; each of the 6 (is there any of it’s best attributes side by side?)
- Career earnings
- Original PFP parents (does it have a 1/1 or non-1/1 in it’s blood?)
- Star preferences
REMEMBER THE ACRONYM W.A.C.O.S TO HELP WITH THIS
Let’s break it down together.
Win & Place Rate: Father = Tom Collins (9% Win, 41%), Grandfather = Mundo (14% Win, 65% place), Grandmother = Triple Crossing (0% Win, 21% Place). So overall not the best, but we haven’t dived deeper into how strong these races were (we’ll cover racing grades soon).
Attributes: Looking for the best attributes next to each other we can generalise that across the bloodline the best stats are consistently Stamina & Finish, which as we learned could mean The Mechanic will be better at longer distances.
Career Earnings: Father & Grandfather is quite high, over 100k and 200k DERBY respectively. Grandma is lower which is to be expected as females are often sent to the breeding barn earlier.
Original PFP parents: Great grandfather is a 1/1 jockey. Great grandmother is non-1/1 but with matching traits (similar background for example) which is good.
Star preferences: All of it’s bloodline has the same star preferences of Right, Turf, Soft although with varying degrees of star strength.
Overall, whilst the win % could be higher there are some good things to like here and it could lead to The Mechanic being a long distance stayer (10,11,12f). Diving into the charts for the parents will reveal more info so feel free to do that if you want to learn more. Link to The Mechanic profile is here.
Ok, now let’s do the same on the mother’s side. Why don’t you attempt to do this on your own before we do it together. Remember the acronym we just learned W.A.C.O.S – Win & Place %, Attributes, Career earnings, Origin PFP & Stars!
Win & Place Rate: Mum = Summertime (11% Win, 35% Place), Grandfather = Sigtryggr (15% Win, 55% Place), Grand Mother (7% Win, 28% Place). Not the best as ideally 30%+ win rate, 50%+ place rate is good.
Attributes: Not as clear cut as the father’s side but Stamina & Finish look to still be the best attributes. Especially on mother, and grandfather.
Career Earnings: Pretty moderate across the board. No 6 figure earnings like the dad’s side.
Original PFP Parents: 1/1 Jockey blood on it’s grandfather’s side. Non- 1/1 on it’s grandmother’s.
Star Preferences: All Right, Turf, Soft which is consistent with the father’s side. No amazing number of stars.
Overall: Nothing amazing here. Good to see stamina & finish being the best attributes indicating The Mechanic may be a long distance horse.
ANALYSING THE TWO BLOOD LINES TOGETHER
Of course, you can’t look at blood lines in isolation. You need to combine the two because sum of all of this will make up the blood and attributes of The Mechanic. Although, it will be random and we won’t know which parts of each bloodline attributes he received.
As you combine the two you will see on both sides Stamina & Finish are the bloodlines highest attributes. This can indicate The Mechanic could be good at longer distances. We’re inferring this because it’s consistent across both bloodlines so could have a higher chance of being passed on to The Mechanic.
But not so fast, it’s time to reveal my big mistake.
Did you see it?
Did you see what I missed?
Scroll back up and look at the 1/1 PFP’s on both the Mum & Dad’s side.
Yep, that’s right both sides have the same 1/1 Jockey PFP in it’s bloodlines. Meaning this horse is in-bread and i totally missed it!
Let’s recap what this means for The Mechanic. It means, he will be penalised as a result of breeding with the same bloodline. Meaning his ability can take a hit. The horse will is negatively influenced by this. The exact impacts to his attributes are unknown, we are only guessing.
So even though all of the family had good Stamina & Finish, we can’t infer it’s been passed on. Inbreeding throws everything out the window. What do we do now?
Ready to give it a go? Create a Photo Finish Live account here (use code: HIDDEN)
P.S If you’d like to learn more about Photo Finish Live and other Web3 items be sure to follow me on X here.
