My races

This page lists the horses of which you are the jockey: your own, and those other players have entrusted to you.

Each line gives the horse and its description, its owner and its trainer, then three time markers: its last test, its last race and its next race. It is from here that you enter, prepare and test.

One detail that saves time: in the Last race column, the time achieved is a link. It reopens the preparation you had saved for that race. Comparing what you asked for with what you got is the quickest way of learning.

The trade comes down to two acts

Preparing each race before its start, and testing the horse between two outings. The first decides the result, the second teaches you how to decide it.

As jockey of a horse that does not belong to you, you get 11% of its earnings. It is a trade you can practise for others, and some players make a very good living from it.

What limits a horse: stamina

Everything starts there. A horse has a reserve of stamina, and every effort you ask of it draws on that reserve. As long as it has some, pushing makes it go faster.

When it has none left and you carry on, it does not slow down: it collapses. A horse whipped too early finishes far worse than one that has been spared.

That stamina has two sources: the resistance written into its genetics, which does not change, and — on Chorus — its resistance biorhythm, which changes all the time. The same horse therefore does not have the same stamina from one week to the next.

A race tactic is therefore nothing other than this: spreading a limited quantity of effort over a course. The rest — the notches of pace, the lines, the sections — is only the way of writing it down. The detail of the controls is in Prepare a race.

What you base yourself on

• The horse's genetics: what it is capable of, and where its strong points are.
• Its biorhythm: its form of the moment, which rises and falls. On Chorus, its resistance component goes directly into the stamina — which says how much it counts.
• The distance and the layout: a flat course and a track full of bends are not run in the same way.
• The riding points, finally, which translate resistance into a budget of effort. Careful: that indicator ignores the biorhythm. It gives the base, and it is up to you to add or subtract according to the form of the day.

The first two are displayed in the Horse tab of the preparation window, the third in the Track tab.

Building a tactic rather than guessing it

There is no recipe — if there were, the game would no longer be of any interest. There is, on the other hand, a method that avoids gross mistakes.

Begin with the track, not with the table. Look at where the bends are and where the straight begins: it is the layout that dictates the division, not the other way round.

Divide into few parts. Three or four portions are almost always enough. Too fine a division gives the illusion of control without improving anything.

Keep enough to finish with. That is the beginner's mistake: spending early, because being in front is reassuring. A horse that runs out of stamina in the last few metres loses far more places than it had gained.

An example to fix ideas — a 2,400-metre race, with a bend a hundred metres after the start:

• 0 to 200 m: unprompted, internal. You spend nothing and you approach the bend close to the rail.
• 200 to 1,400 m: prompted, internal. You make ground without ruining yourself, taking advantage of the rail in the bends.
• 1,400 to 2,400 m: whipped, middle. You empty the reserves over the finish, a little off the rail to reduce the risk of getting boxed in.

That division is not the right answer: it is an answer, for a given horse, on a given day. Change the horse, the biorhythm or the track and it becomes a bad one.

The rail, and the risk of being boxed in

Running on the rail gains ground in the bends: you turn shorter there. It is a real and free gain.

The price to pay is that you can get boxed in behind a slower horse, with no way out. Hence the reflex of many jockeys: the rail as long as you are rolling along, the middle when you need to be able to attack.

Testing is trying without risking anything

The test makes your horse run alone, over the distance of your choice, with the preparation of your choice — and gives you the result straight away. No opponents, no waiting, nothing at stake.

The verdict bears on your ride, in three states that are a lesson in themselves:

• “You did not push hard enough”: the horse's abilities were not used;
• “Very good test” or “Excellent test”: you are in the right zone;
• “You pushed too hard, it exhausted itself”: you have crossed the limit.

It is the most direct way of finding where a horse's limit lies, and it costs nothing but time: give it three hours to recover before racing it for real.

On Almina and Bezir, a good test also makes the horse's obedience progress — 50 or 100 points depending on its quality, and only the first test of the day counts. If you have not got time to do it yourself, the lad jockey takes care of it once a day: it is the “automatic test”, switched on from this page's actions menu, and set by default on horses still to be born.

On Chorus, there is neither obedience nor lad jockey, but the test is more important there than elsewhere, not less: it is what brings the biorhythm back up.

On that world, the biorhythm moves with each effort, test or race, and always by the same logic — that of the three verdicts above:

• ridden in the right zone, the horse gains biorhythm, and that is where it gains the most;
• spared too much, it gains almost none;
• pushed too hard, it loses some;
• and if it cracks in a race, it loses a lot.

One exception: races with random genetics do not touch the biorhythm — they are not run with your horse's abilities, so it would be odd for them to judge its form.

Practical consequence, and it is the great difference from Almina and Bezir: the biorhythm is managed by hand. A race that went badly costs form, and it is by testing — well — that it is recovered. A Chorus player who never tests sees his horses decline without understanding why.

Building up templates

A tactic that works does not have to be reinvented. My tactics lets you keep templates of them, chosen above all by distance and by the number of points they consume, and which then apply to any race.

If the race is not prepared

A tactic drawn at random is applied at the start, so that the horse does not set off completely handicapped. But the jockey is then no longer considered as such for that race, and gets nothing.

An owner who notices that his jockey has prepared nothing can take his place, for the length of one race. It is a safety net, not a habit to get into: warn the jockey instead.

The contracts

The horses entrusted to you arrive through My contracts: a request is accepted or refused there, a current contract is cancelled there. The tick boxes and the actions menu let you deal with several requests at once.