Hello, this is Mike Piazza, the founder and managing partner of Zilla Racing Stables.
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to this fantastic question.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is placing your horses based off purchase price.
It works both ways. If you bought a horse for $5,000 who turned out to be an elite talent would you place him in a a $40,000 claimer because you bought him cheap?
The truth is, once the hammer drops the purchase price from that point on actually becomes irrelevant.
A horse’s auction price is very similar to a draft pick of a professional sports team.
For example, a horse that you buy relatively cheap would be equivalent to a 20th round pick, and a horse that is very expensive is equivalent to a first round draft pick.
A hight pick does not guarantee results.
As in baseball, if the player is costing your team more than they’re helping you, only a bad manager would continue to put that player on the mound because of what “round” it used to acquire that player in a previous year.
Whether you buy a horse for $1000 or a million dollars you must objectively evaluate your horses potential, talent, and upside relative to the cost to maintain.
In the case of Antebellum, she never grew. She is a very small horse, and while small horses can run, generally when they don’t grow it limits their upside.
Also after we bought Antebellum, her full sister Forestone went on to lose I believe 11 straight maidens, and was running out of town losing in cheap maiden claimers.
We also placed Antebellum in a claiming race for $40,000 not once, not twice, but FIVE times, and the market rejected her at that point.
This is why the purchase price is irrelevant. If she was “worth 100K” surely they would have snatched her up.
Another very important thing to understand here is, once you have identified your horse as a claiming horse, if you are entered in a race where you don’t think there is a good chance your horse will get claimed, that means you are in the WRONG RACE.
That last race was NOT Jose’s fault. She lacked the punch to go through. She ran very good, and even ran a career top on the Ragozin sheets.
If anything, I regret not placing Antebellum in cheaper sooner.
Even if she did win the race you mentioned it was highly unlikely she would move forward enough to beat the next condition NW2L40,000, which is a brutally tough condition for a horse of Antebellums ability.
Owning horses is very similar to poker. Once your hand enters in “negative “EV” (Expected Value Theory)*” territory it is time to cut bait.
Cut your loses, and move on. You will do more harm trying to “recover what you put in”. Free up those resources to be placed into a more productive resource.
We were also trying to win a race. You can’t pay the bills if you don’t win races.
Now the new owners make out too. They now have a horse at a NEW cost-basis.
It costs 40-50k a year to keep horses in training on the NYRA circuit. Wether they are cheap claimers or stakes horses. I don’t think its in my partners best interest to continue to pay monthly expenses on a horse that is very unlikely to earn more than it will cost to maintain. You will never recover the purchase price. So like poker, what you put in the pot is gone. All you can do is make sound decisions going forward, and not look back.
Someone mentioned a “tax write-off”. That also is a big fallacy. Wether you can write it off or not you’re still losing money. Id prefer to make $1,000.00 and pay taxes on it than lose a $1,000 and “write it off”. You still lost one thousand dollars.
In closing I would also like to mention there was an 8 way shake on the winner. There was no shake on Antebellum. Only one trainer (Falcone Jr.) saw enough in Antebellum to “pony-up" $20,000.
If Antebellum was worth more than $20,000 there would certainly be more than one person interested in her, especially at Saratoga.
Hope this helps,
Mike
Mike Piazza
Zilla Racing Stables
www.zillaracingstables.com
