When building my stable intially, I didn’t have a plan. I bought horses of every preference and primarily focused on fillys. After a few weeks, I realized I needed to change my strategy. I was going to end up with a stable full of random preferences and come breeding time, I would have no advantage. Because RDF is by far the most competitve pref type, with the most S+ horses, I decided to go after RTF for two reasons.
First, while RDF has the best horses in the game currently, every Stable managers biggest dream is to win the Virtual Kentucky Dirby, which is LD. In the long rung I figured it’d be more profitable to avoid that as my focus. Second, RDF horses where the pref that I could most easily cross over into RTF. Similarily if I had a strong RTF pref filly, I could breed with a weaker dirt pref stud and hopefully still keep my turf preference.
After talking with a few of the more experienced players in the game, I was encouraged to go out and buy a matriarch for my first stable. After looking at the marketplace, I decided to snap up Fulvia for 344k derby. She had a decent track record at that point and had a good bloodline, so I felt she was worth the gamble. Another reason I made the purchase was she was two at the time. For any new stable looking to get into breeding, I feel the best strategy is to buy a 2 year old filly, race her for the remainder of that season and then retire to breed, which is exactly what I did in this instance.
Upon her retirement, I realized how poorly I had chosen races for her. Because she did so well in sprints early on, I only raced her in sprints instead of exploring longer distances. Had I done that, I would have realized she was much better suited for 9-12 furlong races. Lesson to you reading, don’t have success with a distance and stick with it. Explore other options until you are certain that you have found the appropriate length.
After finding the crown jewel of my stable I knew that I had to go out and buy more pieces. Because Fulvia has Astro in the bloodline, I went after S fillies with no 1/1 blood. I grabbed Jewel of Cleopatra, Whirlwind, and later Countess. I didn’t do this because I believe non 1/1 blood create better racers. I did this so that I could breed with different powerful bloodlines and bring their foals together in the future. I wanted to breed Jewel with a stud that had Jockey Blood, Whirlwind with Scuba, etc. and when their offspring were able to breed, I’d eventually combine them. The notion that staying pure blooded is the best solution has yet to produce consistently good racers. I believe the best is to combine with 1/1 in a systematic orderly fashion. I also wanted horses with strong RTF prefs so I could breed them with RDF and either flip them, or bring them close to flipping them.
Go into building your stable with a strategy. I find it best to build with a focus on one preference…potentially two. But spreading yourself amongst numerous prefs will ultimately be much harder to manage and also more expensive come breeding season. In the next week, I’ll walk through my two biggest purchase. An S+ stud, Axis, and an S+ filly, Gianna D’antonio.
Before, I end this post, how has my matriarch, Fulvia, done so far at helping me build my stable?
She’s produced 2 S+ and 2 S foals. I kept her 1st foal, Jackson, who earned nearly 450k derby (310k net after stud fee) and is now in the stud barn. Her 2nd I sold for a 40k derby profit after stud fee. Her 3rd foal was an S+ filly who will hit the track in 3 days. And her last foal was bred in house for 8k derby and sold for 300k for a profit of 292k.
Why is it important to have a queen of the stable, just from the profits of the two foals I sold, I have basically covered the original cost of Fulvia and she still has 18 more foals to produce. Hope this was helpful and feel free to hit me up on Twitter or Discord.
