This is part 6 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 how a competitive edge in this game can be the key to your success, as well as a scoring method to find horses that have the potential to be great racers.
If you haven’t created an account, now is the time to do it here (use code: HIDDEN)
Let’s head out onto the track and jump into Part 6!
Now, for the purpose of this article, we’re going to assume you’ve just bought a horse and are going to race it. We’re also going to assume you’re looking to earn a profit from racing your horse. What we’re going to unpack is a PFL basic Google tracking sheet which you can use to track the profitability of your horse from racing and other key information, including whether your horse is netting you a decent ROI.
Now this is a simple sheet and great for tracking 1 race horse. I first saw an early version of this sheet on NFTLeano’s youtube videos and you can check them out here.
You can, of course, modify this sheet yourself to cater for more horses or however you would like to use it best.
You’re going to want to click file -> Make a copy in order to be able to use it yourself.
The PFL basic tracking template should look blank, like the below.
Let’s breakdown and go through each section.
We will also use a sample horse to demonstrate how to utilise the PFL Basic Tracking Template afterwards.
GREEN: The first section in the top left corner contains the basic & fundamental information about your horse. Fill out the name, letter grade, archetype and distance (if known). If you don’t know your distance you can leave it blank.
YELLOW: Anything in yellow is designed for you to be able to use and fill in with the necessary information. When you fill the cells in yellow in, it won’t impact the formulas in the back end.
WHITE: Anything white shouldn’t need to be touched and should automatically populate when you fill out the cells in yellow.
FLURO GREEN: The fluro green box automatically pulls in the current price of the $CROWN token. Due to hitting my limitations, you will need to update the yellow box** below it with the current price of crown so it flows through to the rest of the sheet’s formula’s.
GREY: Anything grey is just extra space and not used in the PFL basic tracking sheet.
**P.S I’m hoping by getting this out there, someone better at Sheets than me might be able to help sort the crown price pulling into the sheet issue out so we can avoid the extra step. If you can help reach out to me on twitter @hiddenhunting
Let’s use our old in-bred friend, The Mechanic, to breakdown the different sections and how to utilise the PFL basic tracking template. You can click this link to access & see his details.
If you would like to buy and use your own horse to follow along you can do that at the marketplace here. If you haven’t yet signed up to Photo Finish Live you can do that by using this link (Use code: HIDDEN) or you can use The Mechanic’s details and we’ll fill it all out together below.
The first thing we’re going to do is load our funds into the PFL game and record that starting amount on our sheet. If you remember I started PFL with a shoe-string budget of $200 USD which equates to 16,000 DERBY ($1 USD = 80 DERBY). So let’s enter that in the top right hand corner.
You will also see this number flow through to the top left hand corner which will have your current bank in DERBY.
Now we’re going to purchase The Mechanic. Firstly we’re going to input the horses details into the green box.
Let’s fill in his name, the grade & the archetype (star preferences). We’re going to leave the distance blank because we don’t yet know what that is. If you’re using a real horse of yours, you might want to look at it’s parents favorite distances as a guess of what distance your horse might like. Or you can utilise other things like breeding reports or other tools to give you an indication of what it’s optimal distance might be.
You can also fill out any notes you might have on the horse or any guesses you might have. You can also input the starting fleet figure if known too. If you bought a foal or an un-raced horse you won’t yet having a starting FF.
We purchased the Mechanic for a total of 9,900 DERBY + 495 DERBY (marketplace fee of 5%). Let’s input the total purchase price (10,395 DERBY) into the horse purchase section.
You will see some key information update after doing this. Including your bank in the top left corner, as well as the ROI information in the right hand corner. If at some stage you were to sell the horse, you would input that information under “HORSE SALES” too.
And that’s all the basic information. If you top up more DERBY you’ll need to add it to your starting balance & reduce it if you were to withdraw some too.
Now let’s get racing!
Your horse can race, up to, approximately every 24 hours. However, the frequency you race your horse is entirely up to you. I’ve been racing The Mechanic for a while now, so we’re not going to input every race., however we will input a few so you can see how this works.
Firstly, we’ve entered him into a race in Season 13, the date and the cost in DERBY. This race cost us 1,750 DERBY or ($21.88 USD).
Now after the race is run we’re going to input any DERBY we earn as prize money and the $CROWN we receive. Remember, every runner will receive a $CROWN reward (sometimes called $CROWN stimmies).
Unfortunately The Mechanic didn’t place so we’re going to input a zero for DERBY earnt but he did receive 15 CROWN so we’ll update that too. The race only had 5 runners so the $CROWN got split evenly between the runners.
So as you can see from the above, we didn’t profit on this race and lost $12.06 USD net (after $CROWN reward).
In the early stages, it may cost you some funds to find your horses optimum race distance before you can profitably place him in races.
Next, let’s see what it looks like with a winning race.
Here’s an example of a race The Mechanic won. You can see the race cost us 1,100 DERBY to enter (or $13.75 USD) but for winning we earned 1,900 DERBY ($23.75 USD), so we were in $10 profit BEFORE $CROWN rewards. After $CROWN rewards our profit was $16.72 USD for the race.
If it is your first ever Photo Finish season, the team have an amazing initiative called The Rookie Rally. After registering (via discord) you’re put into a special group with everyone else who’s experiencing their first season. It’s a safe space and if you have any questions you can ask them here with even less pressure.
At the end of the season, there’s The Rookie Rally, which are special races only for people completing their first season. You can enter your horse for FREE and get a guaranteed reward even if you lose. This helps new players keep some funds in their bank to be able to enter more races and experience the game for longer! It really helps in the early stages of the game.
In my example below, The Mechanic didn’t win but you can see below I earned 27 $CROWN just for participating.
I’ve been racing The Mechanic for a while now, so the sheet is more complete.
Click here to view the more completed spreadsheet of The Mechanic
The Mechanic, at the time of posting this is only 4 years old, so still has a long racing career ahead of him. However, at some stage, he will reach his peak and start to decline. Hopefully by using the tips in Part 5 you can find a wolf in sheep’s skin that has a greater chance of turning a profit early. From my example, there was a steep learning curve and a lot of the early races weren’t exactly profitable as I was finding out the optimum distance for the horse.
The above example is based of a historic record of the horse, and at times I was selling $CROWN to fund the ongoing racing expenses. As a result, I would manually update the price when I sold the $CROWN so it was an accurate reflection of the P&L at the time. If you do not do this, it will use the current market price of $CROWN. So just be aware.
Return on investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment’s cost.
The PFL Basic Tracking Template calculates your ROI for you to help you determine how your investment is performing. However, it is up to you to do what you want with that information.
Ok, so now we’ve gotten a bit more technical on managing the process of racing your horse. I really do want to arm you with the tools to avoid making the same first mistakes I did. Using this sheet will help you understand how profitable your horse is from racing and how much you’ll need to earn in order to start getting a positive ROI from your horse. Spend some time and try it for yourself or if you feel confident you might just be ready to…
Buy your first horse!
If you feel like you know enough and would like to buy one, you can. Be mindful of your budget and make sure you have enough DERBY for at least 5 or 6 races in case it takes a while to work out your horses optimum racing distance. It might also be a good time now to re-read the guide to buying your first horse.
You will need to create a Photo Finish Live account here (use code: HIDDEN) and you can browse the marketplace here. I would also encourage you to jump into the Photo Finish Live discord and use the beginner chat. Maybe share two horses you are looking at and ask for some help. This is something i didn’t do (but should have) as it would’ve helped me avoid buying an in-bread horse! Ahh, the beauty of hindsight.
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 and to show support, when joining, use my referral link (use code: HIDDEN)
P.P.S For transparency, the content I create is unpaid and when you KYC I will receive some in-game tokens which I use to support making more amazing content.
Can’t wait? Check out these free resources with more information:
Create a Photo Finish Live account here (use code: HIDDEN)
Recorded Attribute Point System Audio Spaces
Guide to Buying Your First Horse
Archetypes Comprehensive Breakdown
ThirdTime Gaming Beginners Guide
