Often I have pondered the question "How can I most effectively spend my points on a sire?"  I am sure you have asked this yourself many of times, some have found an answer others may be dwelling into sim obscurity trying to find an answer.  I have come up with a system that I use to pinpoint the key quality I want in my new horse "SPEED".  Obviously the faster my new horse can run the better chance he/she has to win, don't you agree?  So let's take a look at this system as I carefully explain it and hopefully it may end up being a way for you to pinpoint which sires are right for you.

First thing we want to do is actually choose a potential sire we might want to use.  How you choose this potential candidate is purely up to you.  I like to find a sire who is a son of a very good sire (ie Mr. Prospector, A.P. Indy, Storm Cat etc). For sake of this article I am going to choose as a test subject PURE PRIZE.  Secondly you will want to know if your going to breed a 2yo or 3yo (this is very important).  In this article we are going to breed a 2yo.  So now we have the all the information we need to get started.

So what we want to do next is calculate the avg Speed Figure per start of PURE PRIZE 2yo offspring.  This is the system in a nutshell.  This number is going to be useful too you in letting you know how fast the horses by him usually are.  As we all know the higher the Speed Figure the faster the horse ran, and we want the big numbers.  Let see how it works...

If you follow along with the article you can see here that there are 17 2yo's so far this year out of PURE PRIZE.  What we are going to do is look at each horse one at a time and write down the type of race and the distance and the Speed Figure the horse posted.  Now for a 2yo this is a lot easier to do as there is less information to process then for a 3yo but it works the same for both.  Now after calculating all the dirt starts we come up with 24 dirt races and total number of all Speed Figures on dirt is 1,395 we dived and come up with 59. The avg Speed Figure of all dirt starts for 2yo's out of pure prize is 59. We also had 8 Turf starts and a total Speed Figure number of 471 after we dived we end up with 59 again. Looks like his babies run equally fast on Turf and Dirt. (So to sum it up you want to add up all the Speed Figure numbers from all the horses starts on dirt then divide that number you get by how many dirt races there was.  The same applies for Turf)

The possibilites are endless what stats you can keep track of.  What i like to do is use excel and keep track of all the starts per distance and per race type (ie MSW, Maiden Claim, Claim, Allowance, Stakes, Graded Stakes) also off-track numbers.  By doing this it gives you a more targeted number and makes it not so generalized.  What I mean simply by this is if we used a sire and came up with an avg Speed Figure of 75 on dirt sounds great, but what if a majority of starts were at the Maiden Claim or Claiming level then our number doesn't look so good.  This is why we want to break it down into race type groups for a more targeted score.  So when we do this with our test sire we come up with the avg Speed Figure on dirt per MSW start is 56 (take all the Speed figures from every MSW race then dived them by how many races there was).  Hrmm a little lower then the general number of 59.  This could tell you that the horse improved at the Allowance level or the stakes level though only marginally.  When we look into it we find only 2 Allowance level starts on dirt but come up with and avg Speed Figure of 69.  Quite an improvement from 56 at the MSW level.  This would tell me that a baby I bred would likely improve speed wise when moving up to the next level. Finally we have 4 Stakes starts on dirt which gave us an avg of 60.  This ends up being lower then our 69 at the Allowance level. The calculation formula is always the same all your doing is using it to break down the numbers for each condition type.  It pretty simple once you get the hang of it. (granted these are small numbers we are working with but for the sake of ease to follow I chose a lesser amount to work with for this article, when doing this for 3yo's the number of races is a lot higher so it does give us a more informative look) 

We finally end up with a picture of what PURE PRIZE has produced so far this year in his 2yo crop.  When looking at this information I might be tempted to pass on him but you have to factor in the little amount of races for this crop.  If you look at the 2yo races from his 2007 crop they are about 5-9 Speed Figure points higher per level.  So what can that tell us?  Maybe he is having an off year, maybe he's not being used with the right Dam-Sires, or just maybe his best babies have yet to been born.  With these numbers I would be hesitant to use PURE PRIZE unless I got decent value for him.

I want everyone to remember this also, this is not a pinpoint on the money sure fire method.  This method doesn't guarantee success.  There is randomness involved.  What this will do is give you an informative way of calculating what a sire's Speed Figure Tendencies are and from there will allow you to make an informative decision if the sire is worth what your going to spend on him.  This also can be done with Dam-Sires(which I highly recomend doing) Matching up a Sire and Dam Sire this way can lead to a multitude of success.  I have shared this information with a few select friends over the years and now I pass it on to you all in hopes that it may lead to new breeding variations and a new way for some to think about lesser known or less frequently used sires.  It takes some work to gather the information and a lot of breeding is still left up to chance but Chance favors the prepared mind.  Until next time may your horse be with you........