Breeding winners

Breeding in PFL is crucial to the future success of owners' stables. There are many reasons why you might make a certain breed but breeding winners is what it is all about.

ai_paddock

2/21/20257 min read

Every season a significant amount of blood, sweat, tears - along with Derby - is spent breeding tomorrow's winners and losers. Owners talk about changing strategies, of increasing or decreasing breeding volume. Moving archetypes, or gunning for the first SS foal. Targeting majors, or for many, just hoping for something that can win more than a 400 Derby claimer.

I see two worthwhile strategies in the current meta:

Try to breed the highest grade horse possible
Try to breed the strongest horse within a grade

There might be good reasons for doing something else, but if you are not clear on what you are trying to achieve, there is zero chance you are going to achieve it!! Obviously you could just brute force your way into some superstar foals purely by weight of numbers - but that's an expensive proposition. A smart owner needs a plan.

Breeding by the numbers

In simple terms, breeding doesn't create either attributes or preference stars. Both are normally distributed around the midpoints of the parents. Now, some horses are lucky and they overperform those midpoints whilst others are unlucky and underperform, but as a whole there is no net change. A small percentage of horses will be very lucky, and those horses will push the frontier of the best horses available in the game. A few seasons ago, that frontier was moving from minus subgrade S+ horses to plus subgrade S+ as the highest rated horses in the game. Then very quickly afterward, that frontier was pushed to SS-, who were mostly -3 or -2 subgrade SS-. Next we will get positive subgrade SS- horses and then SS foals.

The fastest way to increase the highest graded horses in your stable is to breed with the highest possible SS- subgrade horse you can find. It's as simple as that. Of course you need to think about the shape of the profile (sprinter versus stayer), preference stars and bloodlines, but if you want the shortest path to the top, that's it. Your foal is most likely to be born at the midpoint of its parents - and you could get lucky and go higher than that.

If you want the strongest possible foal in a specific class, its not so straightforward, but its still relatively simple. You want to position the midpoint of the parents to be around +3 of the grade you want and hope for the best. So an S +3 sire and a S+ -3 dam would be a good combination to get you a strong S foal. But the foal could roll-up to a weak S+. Simple but not easy.

Subgrades play a big role in dictating breeding outcomes. Take a look at this table.

Firstly this table in its 2nd column shows the normal distribution of up rolls and down rolls, centred on 0. A down roll of -1.5 would something like S+ and S parents creating an S- foal, 1.5 grades below the mid-point of the parents (somewhere between S+ and S). Very rare - less than 1 in 200 chance. An up roll of 0.5 would be S+ and S parents creating an S+ foal. Pretty common, a 2 in 7 chance (28%).

If you look at the third column, this represents the subgrade of the foal. What does this say? Well, if you get a down roll, that foal, on average will be a +1 to +2. That's on average - so many will be higher than that - perfect for grade restricted stakes races.

Conversely, up rolls, on average are -1/-2 subgrades. Which is good if you want to increase the frontier horses in your stable, but they, on average, won't be competitive on the track.

The final two columns tell us something else that is really interesting. Down rolls are more likely to be created by minus subgrade parents, and up rolls are more likely to be created by plus subgrade parents. Clear as mud. If a foal down rolls from the mid-point of the parents there is a 3/4 chance it will be +subgrade. If the foal up rolls there is a 15% chance. -subgrade parents are more likely to create down rolls, +subgrade parents are more likely to create up rolls. This is because subgrades shift the mid-point of the parents towards or away from the threshold for the next grade. Don't be surprised if you randomly mix a -subgrade S grade sire with a +subgrade S grade and end up with a bang average S grade foal. That is by far the most likely outcome. And who wants another average S grade foal? If you want things to change in the performance of your foals then you have to change something in your breeding strategy.

Breeding winners on the track

In analysing over 150k horses, there are some key insights:

historically around 16-17% of horses are profitable purely on the Derby they earn
about 24% of horses have won a restricted stakes race
only 3.5% of horses have won a graded race

Obviously changes to the game affect these numbers over time - but this is what we need to overcome to succeed as stable owners. To help owners with their breeding plans below are a list of tables of studs, organised by archetype and sorted by what % of their foals have won graded stakes races. Also included are percentages for foals that are profitable and winning restricted stakes races.

Right Dirt

With these tables its important to remember that in earlier seasons there was less competition with smaller populations. That being said foals of Bedlam massively over perform the benchmarks stated at the beginning of this section with 30% profitable, 68% restricted stakes winners and 38% graded stakes winners, 10x the average. As a low volume stud, Khonsu stands out on this list in 5th place. Maybe the 24k breeding fee puts owners off, but the results have been extremely good.

Of the RDS studs, this archetype is dominated by two studs, Doc Holliday and Night Saturn. This creates a problem where their offspring fill plenty of other slots on this list, making breeding difficult to plan out. Given the small size of the population plus the lack of stars amongst the S+ and above cohort, makes breeding complicated in this area.

Left Dirt

The gen0 studs may not be with us any longer, but there are plenty on these lists. Pocono's Lussi Juice leads the LDF list, but maybe out of favour in recent seasons with only 1 cover so far in season 25 (at time of writing). 'Bullish' in 3rd place is another low frequency stud. As a minus subgrade S+, horses like this are less popular in the current meta. Many more breeds favour SS- studs rather than horses that no longer represent the frontier of highest attributes. Sprinter Sacre continues to climb pretty much ever stud list I have created and currently has 17 covers this season.

Amongst the soft lovers, Excitable Boy, with low preference stars, represents a bit of a cross-over breeding stud with foals across several different archetypes.

Right Turf

Forest Owlet is another low star crossover breed stud with 0 fast stars with an impressive 20% of foals winning a graded stakes race. The immaculate Churro leads the RTS crew. Little Dynamite has no covers this season despite his record of success. Maybe the meta has moved on? The same goes for Little Queenie.

Left Turf

As a small population, there are very few LTF studs of note. There are some more famous names amongst the LTS studs, but again many have now retired, falled out of favour of the meta. Mega Monke, a relatively young 8 year old stud, a -3 S+ grade, has over 20 covers this season.

In conclusion breeding by looking at the on track performance is an interesting but frustrating process. The three season wait from breeding to racing means the meta can change considerably in that gap. Gretsky said skate to where the puck is going. Easier said than done in PFL. Hopefully in seasons to come we will soon see SS- studs having enough data to feature in this kind of analysis. Breeding off this data feels like driving by looking through the rear view mirror; sooner or later you are going to end up in a ditch.

Hopefully you found some stats or the top studs by graded stakes winners useful, amongst all the recently deceased gen0 horses and off-meta washed up studs. With changes coming next season in the breeding structure, expect to see changes in owners' breeding plans.

Join the fun and put these insights into practice at PhotoFinish.Live and if you are considering starting your own stable please consider using my referral code: PADDOCK or just click on this link: https://signup.photofinish.live/?referralCode=PADDOCK

Please remember this is a web3 game where you spend your own money. Nothing I write about should be considered financial or investment advice.