The $550,000 Horseshoe Casino Cincinnati Spiral Stakes on Saturday at Turfway Park features a large field of 12 three year olds. Capo Bastone got third in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile and won his three year old debut, an allowance race at Gulfstream last month.
The real horse racing enthusiast probably recognizes the name Grey Lag. This champion thoroughbred in the early 1900s got his name not because of his color (which was really chestnut), but because of the small grey patches on his belly. Trained by Hall of Famer, Max Hirsch, he didn’t win his first race until his fifth career racing start.
We released our new Bonus Program on Thursday. Players will become instantly available for it starting today. Whenever a player is active in any trainer tournament except Yellow, they earn credits. When they earn five credits, a player is given a token, which is an automatic entry into this Bonus Program. We built 24 Kentucky Derby simulated races containing equally-matched contenders.
Further modifications were done to the servers adding additional speed to the website. Though there’s a little room for improvement, overall, the site is now very fast and stable. The average load time per page has been cut down five times now over the last eight months. We’ll continue to make minor tweaks weekly in order to further enhance the overall speed of the website.
In order to have more customized General Tournaments published faster, we will be releasing a program by next Monday that automatically generates new General Tournaments based on popularity (what percentage of available slots filled) and by availability (what percentage of horses that just entered this tournament would instantly be eligible again and not affected by our horse aging program).
Monday morning we updated the servers with new code that simplified the call process to the data bases. The site appears to be running faster, especially after you’ve loaded each page one time. This is all part of a caching process. The site speed also seems to be more consistent.
The $600,000 Grade 2 Rebel Stakes will take place on Saturday, March 16, at Oaklawn Park and will feature a field of 11 three-year-olds. Super Ninety Nine, the 11 1/4 length runaway winner of the Grade 3 Southwest Stakes on February 18th leads the field.
The G1 $300,000 Santa Margarita Handicap to be run Saturday at Santa Anita Park will feature a small but talented field of fillies and mares, featuring Joyful Victory and Brushed by a Star who will renew their rivalry here. In the past two races they have each taken one, each beating the other by 3-4 lengths.
I’ve been reading the replies to my earlier post on this subject. First, I want to say thank you for keeping the conversations civil and on-track. We’re always determined to improve key areas of game play. I promise you, this is not for practice. With that said, the discussion has to be kept honest. The game is structured and built from a core foundation of functionality.
We’re in the process of evaluating several methods of further refining our classification system associated with our General horse racing Tournaments. The classification system entices players to enter horses with over a 130 BSR into General Tournaments and to create a more competitive environment for our horse racing game players while participating in General Tournaments.
The G2 Tampa Bay Derby features a field of 9 runners who will go 1-1/16 miles. This features the much anticipated stakes debut of the highly regarded Verrazano, and was the top individual betting choice in the second Kentucky Derby Future Wager of 2013.
Flashback and Goldencents will headline Saturday's $300,000 San Felipe Stakes at Santa Anita. Flashback is undefeated in two lifetime starts including most recently, a 6-1/4-length front-running win in the 1 1/16-mile Robert Lewis.
We’re adding a new feature next week that will automatically regenerate popular General Tournaments. Currently, we automatically regenerate General Tournaments based on a specific surface. Once these reach a certain level of entries, another one automatically regenerates itself. Again, this feature only works for certain surfaces.
Later today we’re scheduling the release of our new core framework, which should significantly increase site speed (we’re keeping our fingers crossed). After three months of analyzing, we now believe we have eliminated all the major repetitive calls to our website every time a page is requested. Our development site is lightning fast, so I’m hoping we end up with the same result.
Overanalyze, winner of the G2 Futurity and the G2 Remsen during his juvenile campaign, leads a field of 12 horses in Saturday's Grade 3 Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct. The field also includes Vyjack an undefeated winner of the G2 Jerome at Aqueduct, and runner up Siete de Oros who lost by a head to Vyjack.
