Latest scientific discovery at the Photo Finish laboratory.

In real life, horses do better with adequate rest.  In most cases, that is also true in Photo Finish.

We're all tempted to run these fantasy critters every 14 days or even more frequently than that because it's fun and because it's usually more profitable to race them than to rest them.  Some of us are more than tempted, we just do it.  Sometimes by design, sometimes by accident.

I always suspected that the software was sophisticated enough to deal harshly with over-racing.  It was advertised as the most realistic racing simulation on the market.  How could it not?

And yet there are instances in Photo Finish where lack of rest does not always doom a horse.  I wonder why?  Perhaps because, like in real life racing, there are horses who can handle a heavy workload with little trouble.

In any event, I was curious about how lack of rest affects a horse and I thought I'd check into it.  I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to look at this before, but I decided to look at a horses four main attributes when well-rested, then again when not well-rested.  A perfect test case emerged a couple weeks ago when Myasa won a race on 5-30-14, then lost horribly on short rest on 6-3-14.

Port Pirie took some heat on the June entry with some camps believing it was a simple case of greed.  Connections at Port Pirie insisted it was just an oversight.  Either way, it is a perfect example for this test.

The four attributes for Myasa when well-rested were:

Break Speed - 81

Early Speed - 90

Top Speed - 91

Stamina - 70

Very good overall ratings.  Good enough for her to easily win the race at 12F against some tough hombres like Run On Sentence, Pluto, and Refractor.

She was back on the track in just 4 days and her lack of rest manifested itself with these numbers:

Break Speed - 73

Early Speed - 88

Top Speed - 89

Stamina - 66

Across the board, the numbers were way down.  The stamina number was especially poor, and woefully inadequate for The Derby at 12F.  She finished last.

So, we have to keep this in mind.  I've had racers that finished a race with an ESN of 1200 (I don't know what Myasa's ESN was after the first race) and I thought, "Cool.  He hardly worked at all.  I can probably send him to that race in 16 days with no repercussions."  

However, if a horse finishes a race with a solidly positive ESN, perhaps that by itself doesn't necessarily mean he may be ready to race soon.  Maybe, as reflected in Myasa's case, the base numbers are still affected negatively, which will probably manifest itself in ugly fashion on the track.

Maybe some of you knew this.  I knew the base numbers got better as a horse matured to full strength and then declined as the horse aged.  I never really thought about significant race-to-race changes as a result of how the horse was being treated.  I'll look more closely at this in the future, that's for sure.