There is gold in them thar hills; a campaign to save LTF

There is some debate on which archetype (the combination of direction, surface and conditions each horse prefers) is the best in the PFL. There is no debate on which is the worst, LTF. Trying to compete in LTF is hardmode for PFL. Like starting Elden Ring as the Wretch, or Football Manager in the 7th tier of the English football pyramid with Truro City, some degens are not searching YouTube for "OP early", but committing themselves to a life of toil by avoiding the easy route and choosing the tougher one.

So how can we make LTF great again? There are no plans for any MLTFGA merch at this point, it's too early in the journey, but remember this day, the day you decided to buy an overpriced 3 star filly and begin your LTF journey to greatness. Then you can ask me for a baseball cap, and I will point you to a hastily designed Red Bubble page.

What makes LTF suck?

Well the first and most obvious problem with LTF is that there are no Gen0 horses. No seeds for the population limited growth from the get-go. This also hampered future seasons' growth, and since then it has never really caught up. The below table is the number of horses born each season by archetype (with the one caveat that they raced at least once).

Okay, so LTF had a rough start, but surely we can selectively breed our way out of this? Well that's not as easy as it sounds, and it all comes down to preference stars. Each horse has a maximum of 9 preference stars. The more stars, the better your chances of winning. We've covered that before on this very blog.

LTF doesn't have any high star horses, in fact, the highest star horse to ever race as an LTF is 6!

Without high star horses to breed with in LTF we need to cross breed from other archetypes. Even then the best possible outcome is 6 stars, and breeding two six star horses together will most often result in six star foals. This is the problem. But let's rewind a bit and go through the numbers (why else are you here?). Why do we want high preference star horses? Why can't we just be happy with mid-preference horses?

Well, horses with more stars win more often. This table is the win rate by stars and archetype (that's why we want a high preference LTF):

We have 8 archetypes, two options for each of three dimensions (2x2x2). LTF is our target. There are three archetypes that are one dimension away from LTF, 3 that are two away and RDS which is the opposite of LTF.

If we assume stars are added together (we will get into the actual calculations of this in a minute) then combining an LTS with 3 stars for direction, 3 stars for surface and 0 stars for conditions with an LDF with 3 stars for direction, 0 stars for direction and 3 stars for conditions, would give us the best possible match (along with LDF+RTF and LTS+RTF). If we just took the mid points of the stars we would end up with a foal with 3 stars for direction, 1.5 stars for surface and 1.5 stars for condition. Not bad, a 6 star house equivalent to the highest star LTFs on the track today. Let's go buy up all the LTS 330, LDF 303 and RTF 033 horses and start printing money.

Good news for people who love bad news as Isaac Brock once said. Guess what? There are no horses like this in the game! Oh yeah, there are plenty of 330 star horses, just no LTS ones. The same is true for the other archetypes. Saving LTF is not for the faint hearted, but faint heart never won fair maiden, and we would be lucky to win one of those with a low star LTF.

If we lower our sights slightly and go after the almost 330 LTS horses we do actually find some hits (these horses are 0.5 stars off what we would ideally like):

• LTS 3 3 0.5 horses: 'Magellan' 'Mars in the Morning' 'Stay Salty' 'Kami' 'Lift the Wings' 'Eucleia' 'Pluto J'

• LTS 2.5 3 0 horses: 'High Chunah' 'Rogers Beach'

• LTS 3 2.5 0 horse: 'Royal Fruits'

So not a lot of options, and this is before filtering for gender, bloodlines and actual on-track performance, some fairly basic analysis anyone would undertake when breeding. I will leave you to find similar horses in other archetypes. One stable, the always entrepreneurial Betelgeuse Stables, at the time of writing, has identified a number of cross-over mares and has them listed on the marketplace at a uniquely high price (for advertising purposes), and the buyer can purchase them along with a breed from one of his studs for 2k.

How do we know how preference stars are calculated? Well we can analyse thousands of previous breeds and look at the outcome. It doesn't matter how complicated the calculation if we can see simple patterns in the outcomes. So before anyone quotes me official documentation on how complex breeding is, I will point you in the direction of Indiana Jones shooting the guy with the fancy sword moves in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Occam's Razor - the best explanation to any problem is often the most simple.

The first thing to note is there is obviously what I would call random noise, and you might call sophisticated genetics at play. Take Champagne Forest for example. Mum was a 7 star RTF, dad was a 3.5 star RTF and the horse itself is a 4 star RTS. How did that happen? Well there is randomness in the outcomes of breeding rolls. You can see this in those big ugly yellow blocks on breeding reports. So bear in mind, when one of the horses has a preference near zero, it could always flip to the opposite preference.

There has never been an LTF major winner, and only one horse has won a prize of over 150k Derby once, Pocono Racing's Can't Get Right coming 2nd in the Season 17 Harbor Classic, a 4.5 star horse.

LTS horses bully LTF on the track, even in good or fast conditions, LTS have a clear advantage over LTF horses. This is why we need to save the LTF archetype! The lack of preference stars in LTF hampers their on track performance, which is 40%+ worse than LTS on their home field conditions of good and fast. This is across all LT races.

Pathways into LTF

To cross breed we need to cross two different archetypes to end up with a LTF horse. We could breed with an LTF but we will cross that bridge later. Which archetypes are good donor matches for an LTF? You know it's serious when we have to get the notebook out.

How do we know its random? Well oxymoronically, many random processes result in a very predictable normal distribution. That's what we have here. If we compare the preference rolls for horses compared to the mid-point of their parents we see that the outcome is normally distributed around zero (the average of the parents). If you are lucky, you might gain half a star over the parents' average. There is about an 8% chance of this happening. If you are unlucky, there is a similar chance that you lose half a star. The reason we have quarter stars in this table is if the parents are 2.5 and 3 stars in a preference then the average is 2.75, and the foal can't roll that - so +/-0.25 stars we can treat as hitting the average too. Hitting the average accounts for circa 85% of all breeds. Don't sweat the complicated genetics too much, just remember that there is an 85% chance your horse will hit the average of the parents when it comes to preferences. (diff_parents in the table below is the number of stars difference between the foal and the average number of stars the parents have)

This is good news for us, the saviours of LTF, because we can plan around these outcomes. Obviously if the best horses today are 6 stars (and I think there is a foal yet to race with more) and the best we can reasonably conjure up from cross breeding (if there were perfect horses to use which there aren't) is also 6 stars how do we actually get to 7, 8 and 9 star horses. In short, with a lot of luck. We are going to have to chain together a number of 8% lucky rolls to incrementally breed to 6.5 and then 7 and then 7.5 etc. We have already discussed this is not a journey for the faint of heart.

One outlier I found was a horse called An Old Man, who managed to generate 2 turf stars from 0 and 0.5 star parents. This is very much an outlier and not something we can rely upon.

LTF: the Mos Eisley of PFL

Welcome to hell, the Galatarasay fans once said to Eric Cantona. First the good news. It doesn't take a great horse to win in LTF. This is not RDF, where you average LTF-quality horse would not be worth running in a claimer. Here are the top 20 earners in LTF.

Hotdog is a star on the track at the time of writing and has the benefit of having his stars not being a hinderance in yielding conditions. There are only 11 LTF horses that have won 100k on the track in winnings and the best horses so far have been 4-5 star ones. The saviours of LTF can improve on these numbers.

I mentioned earlier that one way to breed better LTF horses was to actually breed with existing LTF studs and mares. Unlike other archetypes there are no blockbuster studs, no major winners and no Gen0. In fact, if you filter for LTF in the breeding tab, this is what you are presented with - nothing that jumps off the page (see the win rate by stars table above!)

Further down the list you will find typical studs like the below, good on one dimension but not maybe up to scratch on the others (thanks to Ardent Park Racing for the image). You want to preserve high stars when you have them, so the best match for this stud would be something with high left and you will have to make compromises on turf.

With LTF horses having typically low stars, it is difficult to plot a route to getting to 6 stars and above. Maybe having high firm stars will at least allow you some advantage on 0% rain races. It's not like several large stables haven't tried to breed LTF winnings for many seasons already. So don't expect an easy task.

Reasons to save LTF

As someone who has taken Truro City to win the champions league in Football Manager, you need the stomach for a long ride. If you don't have the budget, or are looking for a swift return on your investment, this is not a journey you want to begin. If you want to support making LTF great again, you can still help by selling horses that you don't want that someone else could use. Cross-over style horses charge a premium on the market, and you can make derby from this rather than letting them waste away in your stable if you don't race or breed them yourself.

For the good of the game and our ecosystem, a healthy LTF would put money in everyone's pockets; stakers, racers, breeders and gamblers. A more competitive LTF archetype would give us all more opportunities to make money.

LTF has generated only 33MM in Derby from entry fees. The game has missed out on probably 350MM in fees by not having a competitive LTF scene. At 20% rake that's 70MM or $850k that could have funded other activites. If LTF was as popular as RDF the gap in fees is 650MM derby or $8MM+ that would have (hypothetically) have been spent. It's safe to assume that if owners had competitive LTF horses they would run them just like any other archetype so there is no question of cannibalisation here. Once we have saved LTF we will then have to save RDS, which is also lagging the pack.

So there is a clear commercial benefit of saving LTF for everyone from the founders to the owners to the stakers (and therefore the value of Crown) and the gamblers (and hence future revenue generating partners). That's reason number one.

The second reason is personal gain. If you can breed a high preference LTF horse, congratulations you have created a money printing machine. Firstly, you will have a significant advantage on the track. Secondly, everyone will want to breed with your studs. Thirdly you will control the best foals in the archetype just like owning K2 has been such a boon elsewhere.

Even if you don't breed an LTF monster, you could make money by breeding the LTS 330, LDF 303 or RTF 033 cross over horses I mentioned earlier. They don't exist in the game today and are a necessary step to better cross over breeding. Again, this is a license to print money, everyone will want to breed with you to preserve their preferences. This is in theory easier and faster than breeding a winning LTF horse, and would make you bank and help others breed into LTF.

The third reason is the challenge. This is PFL on hard mode. Any Elden Ring worth their salt begins as the wretch, and any real Football Manager player starts at the bottom of the league pyramids. There is glory to be had in LTF. It's the 1849 California gold rush. You don't have to find gold yourself, you can be like Levi Strauss, and make your money helping people pan for gold. When RDF is as competitive as it is, what chance do you have to breed better foals than the top stables, with all their Gen0 and Gen1 purebreeds, and 100 dice rolls each season to beat the odds by brute force?

My intention in a post like this is to explain the process of getting to decent horses in LTF. Many are already on that path, and hopefully this article will drive demand into your studs, and more options for your mares. Please feel free to point people towards it if you think it will benefit your own breeding programs.

I think the three reasons are compelling whether you want to grow the ecosystem, personally benefit or are just up for the challenge (or all three). Short of an LTF DLC dropping(?) we are going to have to do this the hard way. If you want to discuss any of this, please message me on Discord. You can find my details through my stable (ai_paddock).

Footnote:

I have been approached by those in the know to tell me that Sloppy Steaks Stake Stable and Spectator Stables have lots of interesting LTF studs to check out for those interested in breeding into the archetype.

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.

Other blog posts:

• Season 19 retrospective: https://aipaddock.com/season-19-by-the-numbers

• A race selection process flow: https://aipaddock.com/selecting-the-right-races-for-your-horses

• How good is your new juvenile: https://aipaddock.com/how-good-is-my-new-juvenile-horse

• Tips for breeding strategies: https://aipaddock.com/charting-the-uncharted-in-breeding-within-pfl

• Know your odds of breeding success: https://aipaddock.com/know-your-odds-before-you-roll-the-dice

• Further down the rabbit hole of ML: https://aipaddock.com/deeper-down-the-morning-line-rabbit-hole-we-go

• What can ML prices tell us: https://aipaddock.com/skill-luck-and-morning-lines

• Finding the optimal distance: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-optimal-distances

• Understanding breeding: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-the-most-successful-breeding-horses-in-pfl

• What are subgrades: https://aipaddock.com/what-are-subgrades-and-how-do-they-work

• Fastest horses: https://aipaddock.com/who-are-the-fastest-horses-in-the-game

• Racing profitability: https://aipaddock.com/how-much-profit-do-you-make-racing-horses

• Trueskill pvp ratings: https://aipaddock.com/which-horse-is-the-goat-in-pfl

• Breeding: https://aipaddock.com/trying-to-understand-breeding-in-pfl

• Evaluating horses: https://aipaddock.com/how-good-is-my-horse

• Understanding performance: https://aipaddock.com/understanding-the-true-performance-of-your-horse

• Do stars matter: https://aipaddock.com/how-much-do-preferences-matter

• FF Rating vs Finish Time: https://aipaddock.com/the-difference-between-ff-rating-and-finishing-time

• Are horses getting faster: https://aipaddock.com/are-pfl-horses-getting-faster