This is part 2 of our comprehensive beginners guide to Photo Finish Live. If you haven’t read part 1 you can do that here.
If you’ve read Part 1 you should know the basics to the trainer horse and how we can use the trainer to learn how to race horses in the game for free. But if you’re like me, you want to get racing for real money as soon as possible.
Well hold your horses, we’re getting there.
If you haven’t created an account, now is the time to do it here (use code: HIDDEN)
Let’s jump into it!
IN GAME CURRENCIES
There are two main currencies used in the game, the first is called $DERBY and the second is called $CROWN.
DERBY: $DERBY is used as the prominent currency for game play. The price of derby is fixed and will never change. 80 Derby = $1 USD.
Let’s look at some common uses of $DERBY:
Buying a horse: To buy a horse, you head to the marketplace page (pictured above). Here you can filter by a number of metrics. I’ve filtered to find a horse that is between 2-3 years old and currently racing. You can see the cheapest horse is Kimmys a 2 year old colt for 3,000 $DERBY. All horses bought on the marketplace need to pay a marketplace fee of 5% on top of the purchase price. So the total cost in Derby is 3,150. To work out the USD cost you divide by 80 = $39 USD. So buying Kimmy would cost $39 USD.
Selling a horse: Similar process to the above.
Paying Race Entry Fees: To enter a paid race it costs DERBY. Some races cost more than others. Race entry fees change based on the type of race eg. handicap vs stakes race (more on this later) as well as the horses grade. The higher the grade of the horse the higher the entry fees can be, but also the bigger the prize.
Prize Money: If your horse wins or places in a race you’ll earn DERBY as prize money.
Breeding Fees: Costs to breed a horse are in DERBY too.
Picks: Betting on races (if allowed in your location) can be performed in DERBY too.
A RACING EXAMPLE: Let’s look at the example above. You can see there are 3 races. We are going to be assessing the cost to enter and the prize money and ignore the rest for now.
The first is a juvenile grade restricted stakes race (This means the race is restricted to 2yo only with a max letter grade rating of A-). It’s ok if you don’t understand the types of races, as we’ll cover this later. Looking to the right hand side you can see the costs of the race. The entry fee is 1,400 DERBY ($17.50 USD), with a total prize purse in DERBY for the race. This gets shared disproportionally, more for the winner, less for second and so on. Not all horses receive a share of this prize money (DERBY).
Compare this with the second race, a handicap. The costs to enter the race (420 DERBY or $5.25 USD) is cheaper but the total prize purse is smaller. And the third race is more expensive than both to enter, being 5,000 DERBY or $62.50 but the prize purse is even bigger.
So the important thing to remember is $1 USD = 80 DERBY. Always.
Let’s look at the second in-game currency, $CROWN
CROWN: Unlike DERBY who’s price is fixed, the $CROWN price is dynamic. $CROWN is the SPL token of the game and the price changes like the price of any other crypto token. Click here to see the current price of $CROWN on Coin Gecko. You can also find the price of crown in the side menu of the Photo Finish Live website here. $CROWN can be exchanged for $USD (or any other token) on the platform of your choosing. Click here to see the how you can swap $CROWN for $USD on Jupiter exchange.
If you’ve been paying attention to the above images, you may have noticed the section on the right called Crown Gift. The Crown Gift is a gift that’s given to EVERY participant who enters a race. Every race is allocated a total amount of $CROWN that gets divided equally between all participants.
Let’s use our racing example again (above). This time we’re only going to look at the first race – the Manor Trail Stakes. By hovering over the “i” next to Crown Gift on the right hand side you can see the total allocation of $CROWN for this race. In this case, it’s 45 $CROWN total. As we mentioned earlier, this total $CROWN is divided equally by the participants. So in the above case each of the 6 runners will earn 7.50 $CROWN. At today’s prices ($0.98 per $CROWN) that’s worth $7.40 USD.
Now let’s see what happens to the $CROWN rewards, in this example, when we increase or decrease the number of participants.
A full race (12 runners) = Each racer would receive 3.75 $CROWN
A small field (4 runners is the minimum for a race to run) = 11.25 $CROWN
So the number of horses in a race effects the amount of $CROWN distributed to each runner of the race.
Other uses of $CROWN: The other use of $CROWN is being able to stake it at race tracks and earning a portion of the fees that track earns. But that’s for another day.
It also worth noting that if you have less than 4 runners in a race you will automatically be refunded your DERBY entry fee and the race won’t go ahead.
The good news is you don’t need any $CROWN to get started, but you will need DERBY so let’s get some of that!
PURCHASING DERBY
It’s about to get exciting. You’re about to load your in game wallet with DERBY and will soon be on your way to buying and racing your first horse! In order to do that, you will need to set up a Solana Phantom Wallet. A tutorial on setting up and funding your wallet is here. You can also buy DERBY with a credit card, however it’s advised to set up a Phantom Wallet so you can exchange $CROWN if needed in the future.
Once you’ve set that up you’re going to need USDC in your wallet. I’m going to assume you know how to do that. Once you’ve got that there, you’ll need to head to the My Stable page -> Stable Financials -> Fund Wallet (see below) or you can click here to go directly to the fund wallet page.
Let’s buy our DERBY! Below you will see the purchase page. You can buy any amount you want by using the custom amount section. Now you’re going to want to fund you wallet with an amount to cover the cost of purchasing a race horse and also some extra to be able to enter it into races.
I wanted to start this on a very small budget, so I deposited $200 initially which gave me 16,000 DERBY.
Please note, purchasing DERBY does incur a 1% platform fee on top of the purchase price. So it cost me $202 to buy 16,000 DERBY.
Deciding your budget and price point is entirely up to you. Now we also add an element of strategy on how to get started. I’m not going to cover all of those strategies, but you can read the Strategies to Buying your First Racehorse here. One of the best strategies to buying your first horse is to jump in the discord and chat to members. The one thing i’ve learned is that the community aspect of the game is huge and people want others to succeed. They offer free help and may even help guide you with a good first starter horse.
It is important to note the number of racing horses in each grade of horses currently (See image right as of May 2024) as well as that higher grade horses can have larger racing fees to pay too.
As you can see, S- & A+ are ultra competitive with the most horses. Where as some of the lower or higher grades don’t have as many. Based on the graph, one approach would be to buy an A or A- horse as a first horse as they are cheaper and less competition is there. But again this is up to you and your budget.
In the next section we’re going to get into a real example of mine and the first horse i bought. There were a lot of learnings with this, but sometimes it’s better to bite the bullet and start if you’re prepared to learn.
In my case, I was prepared to lose the full $200 but thankfully that hasn’t happened!
Ready to create an account? Do that here (use code: HIDDEN)
P.S If you’d like to learn more about Photo Finish Live and other Web3 items be sure to follow me on X here.
