The ULTIMATE Guide to Photo Finish Live Part 5: Wolf in Sheep’s Skin & Finding Your Competitive Edge

This is part 5 of our comprehensive beginners guide to Photo Finish Live. If you haven’t read Part 1 you can jump back to the start and read that here.

If you’re up to date you would have just learned about the different archetypes and types of races. You would have learned how to assess a race type against a horse. You may have even made your first purchase! Or maybe after reading part 5 you’ll feel confident enough to buy one.

If you haven’t created an account, now is the time to do it here (use code: HIDDEN)

Let’s head onto the track and kick off Part 5!

It’s time to unpack a couple of new strategies to buying and racing your first horse.

Before we do this, let’s recap. There are different archetypes & star preferences and you might chose as a strategy to build a stable within that archetype – LTF for example.

But how do you know which horse to buy within LTF and if it’ll be any good?

We’ve already covered things like ensuring there isn’t any inbreeding (the first thing to look for) and assessing it’s bloodline too. We’ve also touched on the different grades of horses & the competitiveness of each grade.

Someone starting off may chose to go for an A+ horse for a couple of reasons – it’s less expensive to race, there’s more race options to pick from & it’s less competitive than S-type horses, to name a few.

But if you want to race to learn, like I did, there is a new strategy I just learned to identifying high potential racers that have an increased likelihood of performing on the track. An we’re going to jump into that very soon. It’s about finding a wolf’s in sheep’s skin.

But i’m going to let you in on a little secret on how to gain a competitive edge first.

FINDING YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE

A competitive edge is a factor which gives a person (or company) an advantage over it’s rivals. 

Let that sink in. Your ability to find your own competitive edge is your secret weapon and will define the success of your stable in this game.

I know what you’re thinking. How do I get a competitive edge when I’m just learning the ins and outs of the game?

Well, lucky you’re here reading this, i’m about to help you massively.

What I love about Photo Finish Live, is how it closely resembles actual horse racing. As a physical horse racing fan there are so many aspects that cross-over into the game.

In real horse racing you have huge stables, with big budgets and what feels like endless limits to what they can spend to breed and race horses.

And that’s the same in this game, where the top stables are dropping huge coin on horses, and keeping breeding in house to cut off their competition from accessing their bloodlines.

But in actual horse racing there are also new trainers, new syndicates & new owners coming into the mix. So how do they compete?

The answer is this. They buy early.

The go to weanling (0-1 years) and yearling (1 year) sales.

That’s the secret.

They look at the bloodlines, the aspects of the horse, the physique and they buy, even though they won’t be able to race the horse for another year or two.

How good they are at spotting what others miss, is their competitive edge.

In Photo Finish, new foals are being born every 4 weeks. So there’s even more opportunities for you to snag a future champion early.

So being patient, buying good high potential horses early is one way you can break into this game and claim your slice of over $30 million in winnings (in the first year of PFL).

But how do you find those good, high potential horses?

That’s exactly what I’m about to teach you.

THE WOLF IN SHEEP’S SKIN (WISS)

a.k.a THE ATTRIBUTE POINTS SYSTEM

I only just found out about this system, but it makes a whole lot of sense when starting out. Actually, after I heard about it I headed to the marketplace to try it out. Then I ended up buying a new foal when i wasn’t even planning to!

The system we’re about to go through helps to identify potential good racers. It utilises the data we know of their parents to give you a better indication if a horse is more likely to perform on the track. I say that because it’s not an exact science.

A quick recap, there are 6 attributes (Start, Speed, Stamina, Finish Heart & Temper) that make up a horses overall grade rating (the letter). In this system we will use these attributes to create a score for the horse we are looking at buying and if it performs well on the score, we can deduce it will likely be a better racer. Of course, again, nothing is certain.

We can use this system on any horse, but today we’ll be trying to find an A+ horse that is going to be a wolf in sheep’s skin (WISS). What this means, is an A+ horse that likely has attributes beyond it’s rating and can perform at the top of it’s letter grade.

By now, i’m sure you’ve already created an account, but if you haven’t do that here (use code: HIDDEN)

For this exercise we’ll assume it’s late in the season and you’re buying your first horse. So we’re going to look for a 1 year old that is about to turn 2 so you can race it very soon.

We are looking for a minimum of 2 stars in direction & surface, and because it’s your first horse we’re going to look for an LTS, RTS, LTF or RTF archetype horse as they are good for beginners & less competitive than RD races. We aren’t too worried about condition as we can use rain % to find a race that suits it.

Let’s head to the marketplace where horses are bought and sold.

Now comes the tedious part. We need to go through each foal one by one and look at it’s bloodline. We need to find a foal that has at least one parent which is the grade higher (or better) than the foal, and one parent the same (or in rare cases also higher) than the foal.

So in our example the foals parents need to look like this.

Foal Grade = A+

Foals Fathers Grade = S- (or better)

Foals Mother’s Grade = A+ (or better)

Remember, we also want to make sure we have no inbreeding (the same horses bloodline on both the mothers and fathers side). Get in the habit of looking at this first.

Give it a go yourself now, by visiting the marketplace page and setting up the filters like we just did.

Ok we found one. Foal of Velma Kelly for sale for 9,680 DERBY (or $121 USD + 5% marketplace fees).

I’ve done the due diligence and checked there is no inbreeding. But we’re not ready to buy this foal just yet.

Now comes the mathematical part. The attribute scoring system.

Remember the foal is made from both it’s parents genes (or attributes) so we’re now going to use some numbers to see if the foal will have a higher chance of being a better runner than the average A+ horse.

To do this we need to assess the grade of it’s parents attributes across all 6 attributes.

For every letter grade higher than the overall foals grade we assign it 1 point, for every letter grade lower than the overall grade of the foal we minus 1 point.

Let’s work it out together now. But before we do, we’re ideally looking for a horse to score 12+ points (but 10 points is ok too).

Remember the foal we are assessing is A+. If we’re searching for an A+ wolf in sheep’s skin, the points are as follows:

S+ = +3 points

S = + 2 points

S- = +1 Point

A+ = 0 Points (The foals grade)

A = -1 point

A- = -2 points

B+ = -3 points

So now we add the two scores together to get our total attribute score

Father + Mother = Total Attribute Score

+9 -3 = +6 Total Attribute Score

So despite having the right parental grade aspects (one parent a grade higher) + minimum of 2 stars  (both direction and surface), this foal fell short of the 12+ (or 10+) needed to pass the wolf in sheep’s skin test. This horse may still turn out to be a good racer but it just doesn’t fit our criteria so we’ll keep looking.

Thanks to the legends at Baked Alaskan Racing there is now a FREE online WOLF IN SHEEP’S SKIN (WISS) CALCULATOR which automatically work’s out the WISS Score so you don’t have to do the maths!

Check out the WOLF IN SHEEP SKIN CALCULATOR here.

Why don’t you give this next one a go on your own.

ACTIVITY: Try working out the total attribute score of the horse.

The horse is called Foal of Long Island and it’s a more expensive filly. I have done the checks further down the bloodline for you and there is no inbreeding.

Have you spotted it? That horse has 2 S parents which delivered an A+ foal. One can infer the probability of it being a higher class A+ filly as the mix of it’s genes are coming from 2 stronger horses.

But how did it score on the attribute point system?

ANSWER: 

Foal of Long Island scored a whopping +24 compared to the minimum we look for +12 (or +10 if you want). Unreal right?

But not so fast, remember we’re looking for a horse who has at least 2+ stars in direction and track preference. Foal of Long Island has 2.5 stars in direction but only 1 star in track preference.

So technically it doesn’t pass the test, but this is where the game comes in. It’s up to you to decide whether a +10 points over “the attribute system” outweighs falling 1 star short on track preference.

As you play the game, what you will learn is this, this game is about making lots of very small decisions that lead to bigger outcomes.

Note: Depending on when you read this, Foal of Long Island may be old enough to race, so you may be able to see if she turned out to be a good racer or not or if she has produced good racing progeny!

Now just to be clear, I didn’t develop this points system and was fortunate to hear about it through an amazing beginner audio spaces on X by @Poseidon Racing & @JGweb3 which you can listen to here. They have some seriously good free resources to help get you started too so check them out.