My tactics

A tactic that worked has no reason to be rewritten for every race. This page keeps your templates: ready-made preparations, which you then apply to any event.

So these are not preparations “for a given race”. A template belongs to no race and to no horse — it is a mould.

The two columns that count

The list gives, for each template, its name, its length and its riding points. These are not decorative pieces of information: they are exactly the two criteria that will make you choose one rather than another.

• The length, because 1,600 metres and 2,700 are not divided up in the same way.
• The riding points, because they say what the template costs in effort. That is what lets you have, for one same distance, a thrifty template for a horse short of stamina and a spendthrift one for a horse with plenty in hand.

A useful collection comes down to a few templates crossing those two axes — not thirty.

Creating a template

The New button opens a window asking for a name, a length, then the usual preparation table — that of Prepare a race, Line column included.

Take care over the name, it is limited to twenty characters and it is all you will see in the drop-down list at the moment of preparing a race. “Tactic 3” will tell you nothing in six months; “2400 thrifty” or “1600 late finish” will tell you everything.

Using it

In Prepare a race as in Test a horse, the Use a tactic list applies the template in one go. The table is then readjusted to the real length of the event: a template built for 2,400 metres applies without difficulty to a race of another distance.

In a test window, the Line column does not exist — the horse runs on the rail there. The template's lines are therefore simply ignored, the rest applies.

A template is a starting point, never an answer

What a template does not contain is precisely what changes from one race to another: your horse's form of the day, the layout of the track and where its bends are, the turf, the opponents.

Apply the template to have a base in three seconds, then retouch. It is always faster than starting from a blank page, and far safer than saving without looking.

The delete button, at the end of the line, removes a template that has become useless. That touches none of the races where you had used it: a saved preparation lives its own life once it is set.