There are a few key aspects to becoming a winning and dominant trainer on Digiturf or RaceClubs. You obviously have to know how to train and where to enter your horse. You’ll need to know about Training Time Charts, and the quality of your horse.
But you’ll also need to know about some of the nuances of becoming a winning virtual horse racing trainer and stable.
Equipment
Each Digiturf or RaceClubs horse needs equipment in order to compete at the highest level possible. Horse shoes and gelding/filly fuel are necessary! Blinkers and vitamins are dependent on each horse.
Your Digiturf or RaceClubs stable can stock up on equipment at any time, purchasable with cash or bonus credits. An items expiry period only starts from when it is first applied to a selected horse. Spare items can therefore be kept in your Digiturf or RaceClubs stable indefinitely until you are ready to use them.
Certain equipment lasts a lifetime while others require replacing after their expiry date:
- Shoes (Alumites) expire after 30 days.
- Gelding/Fillies Fuel is permanent.
- Blinkers can be removed and re-applied.
- Vitamins can be applied every 15 days.
All items will improve a horses performance to varying degrees or have no effect at all, albeit blinkers which can also have a detrimental effect on a horse.
Vitamins affect a Digiturf or RaceClubs horses fitness by 5% to 10% and could flip your horse over 100% reverting it back to 50%. Please consult the Equipment Shop for detailed information.
One of the major keys to running a successful and winning virtual online horse racing stable is making sure your equipment, especially your shoes, and up to date and applied correctly. You never want to enter your virtual horse into a race without shoes unless you’re purposefully trying to lose!
Jockeys
The Jockey riding your Digiturf or RaceClubs horse in every race is selected by the system rather than being determined by the owner of the virtual race horse.
As in live racing there is an unpredictable element in every race where a horse (& even the jockey) doesn’t run perfectly to form. This is represented by the Random Factor at Digiturf and RaceClubs.
In Virtual Racing the Jockey simply represents the order/rank of the Random Factor in relation to the other virtual horses in the race and is not an indication of the ‘weight’ of each Random Factor received. The best Jockey in the race represents the best Random Factor received whilst the worst Jockey indicates the worst Random received by a virtual horse in the race, ie. each jockey does not represent a specific random factor. So an average jockey can represent a very good random in one race a very poor one in the next race.
The Random Factor number that is generated for each virtual race horse in a race is determined irrespective of who the horse is, its recent race results or who owns it, ie. completely random. This means, for example, that the closeness or gap between the best and second best Random Factors in races will differ in every race.
Put in simplistic terms, the jockeys at Digiturf and RaceClubs are partially tied to how well your horse will run. The better the jockey assigned to your horse for that race, the better he will do. This doesn’t mean you can’t win without the best jockey, it just helps you win by more lengths!
Jockeys are determined in the following way:
- The race generator determines an outcome of the race based on each horses innate abilities, preferences for the race spec, the horses preparation for the race and a random factor. The race generator allocates a random factor to each horse in the race, without considering a horses ability, prep and preferences or race history – it is random and without any bias.
- The Digiturf and RaceClubs race generator randomly selects Jockeys per the number of horses in the race.
- The race generator allocates the best Jockey in the selected list to the best already determined RF, the next best Jockey to the next best RF and so forth, the poorest selected Jockey receiving the poorest RF.
Where virtual horses are closely matched in terms of their abilities, such as Championship race series, it was found necessary to reduce the Random Factor element in relation to all other elements/factors such as horse fitness, weight, draw, ability over distance, ability over going, etc. This lower Random Factor is represented by the game only utilizing the top 17 of the 34 Jockeys in the Championship Finals and Qualifiers.
