Enrol a horse

You have just clicked Enter from a race: all that is left is to choose the horse. This window goes that way round — a race, then a horse among yours. The opposite way also exists: Enter a race starts from a horse and looks for somewhere to enter it.

At the top, the essentials of the event are recalled: its name, its date, its length, the cost of entry and its criteria. So you decide without having to go out and check.

The list contains only eligible horses

That is the point to understand, and it saves you a great many useless attempts. Before showing you anything, the window has already set aside everything the race would refuse. What remains are your horses — or those you ride — that are born, not retired, of the right speciality, within the bounds of age, score and earnings, of the sex required if there is a condition, at auction if the race is a claiming race, admitted by the reservation if there is one, and not already entered elsewhere.

Hence the right way of reading an empty list: it is not a breakdown, it is an answer. None of your horses meets the conditions. Read the Criteria line just above again, it will tell you which one is blocking.

For the earnings, it is indeed the total the race looks at that is applied: the free earnings for a free race, a cup or a random-genetics race, the extended earnings for a regulated race or a competition. A horse missing from the list although its earnings looked right to you is often the other total having been read. See A horse's card.

Choosing between the horses kept

Each horse shows what you need to decide without opening its card:

  • its genetics, in compact form;
  • its biorhythm: the value, followed by an arrow going up, down or staying flat. On Almina and Bezir, one single biorhythm and the arrow compares it with the previous hour; on Chorus, two biorhythms — speed and resistance — and the arrow compares them with the last point recorded, that is to say the last training session, test or race;
  • its team: owner, trainer, jockey;
  • its last race: date, speciality and distance, place out of the number of entrants, and time.

Those last two pieces of information are the ones that really serve. The biorhythm and its arrow tell you whether the horse is on a good slope; the last race reminds you what it has just done and over what distance.

The filter, at the head of the list, accepts your folders — and they are those of the role you came in by: your owner's labels from the Owner menu, jockey's from the Jockey menu, trainer's from the Trainer menu. Each keeps its own filter memory.

Entering, then preparing

The Enter button enters the horse, the mention Registration done confirms it, and that line's button becomes Prepare the race.

The list stays on screen, and that is deliberate: a race accepts several of your horses, within the limit of your quota. You can therefore enter a second, a third, without closing anything. Nothing takes you elsewhere until you ask for it.

When you click Prepare the race, the window closes and the preparation of that entry opens — one at a time. If you have taken several, the simplest is to enter them all first, then prepare them from My races in the Jockey menu, which gathers them. See Prepare a race.

In any case there is no hurry: a ride is built or modified right up to the close of entries.

If the entry is refused

The list is a preselection, made at the moment the window opened. The real check happens on the click, and it can still say no — a red message then replaces the horse's information:

  • the deadline has passed, or the race is no longer open: events close at the stated time, even while you are thinking;
  • the race is full: two players can be after the twentieth place at the same time, only one gets it;
  • your quotas are reached, as owner or as jockey;
  • the balance does not cover the entry. Careful, it is the sulkies of the horse's owner that are debited, not yours: a jockey can therefore run up against a till that is not his own;
  • the horse is already entered: a horse has only one pending entry at a time, whoever took it. If its jockey has entered it elsewhere before you, that is the message you will see.

One case is worth knowing in advance: a horse belonging to the clan cannot be entered. A member has to receive it first. See Clan's horses.

In the same section