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This is a post that a player made back in 2007 to help explain Showing vs. Breeding. I have made a few, very minor, changes to bring it up to date. Thanks to LookingGlass (wherever she is!) for the time and effort she put in on this!
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PT Scores: Showing vs. Breeding

Before I begin, please do me the favor of saying the following words aloud three times:
Showing ability and breeding ability are not related.

Go on, say it.
Say it again.
.One more time
Showing ability and breeding ability are not related.

It seems to be a very common misconception that, on Hunt and Jump, the showing ability of a particular horse has some integral relationship to that animal's breeding ability. There is an urban legend that holds that horses with high PT scores are going to be fantastic breeders. It is common for people to leave showing recommended fillies intact 'just to try'. Repeat that mantra one more time. Showing ability and breeding ability are not related.

There are a lot of misconceptions concerning some of these things, so I will begin this lesson with some vocabulary.

Breeding Ability: A horse's breeding ability is an invisible number that is generated for that horse when it is born or created. At no point during the horse's lifespan will this number ever change. For stallions, breeding ability is what Charlie looks at to determine whether an individual horse should be left intact. Foundation horses must be over a certain score, while lined stallions must not be substantially inferior to (worse than) their sires. Prospective stallions should always be taken to Charlie because he provides the fastest, easiest analysis of an otherwise totally hidden attribute. Any stallion Charlie would geld is not worth breeding to. Breeding ability is also what is used to generate the scores for a horse's foals. Horses with strong breeding ability produce offspring with good scores; horses with poor breeding ability produce offspring with poor ones.

Showing Ability: A horse's showing ability is also an invisible number that is generated for a horse when it is born or created. At no point during the horse's lifespan will this number ever change. When horses are taken to see Lucas for Showing Aptitude Testing, invisible showing and breeding scores are compared. Horses whose showing ability score is substantially higher than their breeding score will be marked as showing recommended. Horses whose scores are close, or whose breeding score is higher, will be marked 'either way'. Please note that this does not mean they are automatically good breeders, or better breeders than showers, only that they are not wildly better show horses than breeding animals.

PT Score: A horse's Performance Test score is a visible number that is generated for a horse when it is taken to see Doris. This number reflects a horse's showing ability, but is influenced by inconsistency: inconsistent horses tend to have lower PT scores than consistent ones even when their showing ability is similar. Remember, PT score relates ONLY to showing ability and has nothing to do with breeding ability.


They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so now allow me to present you with an image that should help you understand why this is a true fact.


Dice? What do dice have to do with pixel ponies? Everything, my friend.

Nothing about this game is as simple as it seems on the surface. Very little is ever handed to you on a plate; most things need to be figured out and take a little bit of problem solving, sometimes a little bit of detective work, and sometimes a little bit of research. Breeding, however, is all about dice.

When a mommy horse and a daddy horse get together to make a little baby horse, two secret numbers are generated by the game's code engine to determine how good at anything that little baby horse is. In other words, two dice are rolled: one for the baby horse's breeding ability, and one for its showing ability. Nobody but Ammit (and maybe Haystack) knows how this works exactly, but I can explain it close enough for horse shoes and hand grenades.

The sire's breeding ability is combined with the dam's breeding ability and the two are twisted with a random modifier to produce an outcome. In other words, if you have a 100% breeding ability stallion and a 100% breeding ability mare, you almost never end up with a 100% ability foal purely because of random elements. Some foals end up better than 100%, and many foals end up lower than 100%, so it's 100% plus or minus several points. In fact, because we can reliably test the showing ability of these 100% (perfect foundation) crosses via PT testing, the showing numbers as reflected in PT scores look pretty much like this:


Now, keep in mind that perfectly consistent 100% showing ability foundation horses (Perfect Foundations, thus, known quantities) have PT scores of 9.9. Note that 9.9 is not the middle point on this scale, it's slightly on the high side. Random modifiers move that score half a point up, and a full point down. You can repeat that same cross a hundred times with the same two horses and get this wide range of numbers purely because of dice.

It's the same for breeding ability. The mommy horse and the daddy horse's breeding ability determines both scores for their offspring, but again, there is a random element involved. Both numbers are otherwise completely unrelated to each other. One foal could have scores from opposing ends of the scale, while a second, otherwise identical foal, could have identical scores on the very bottom of the chart, while yet another could have two scores from the middle of the number range.


The numbers generated by the magic formula are essentially unknown. You can only guess at one of them, the horse's showing ability as indicated by its PT score. Its breeding ability could be almost anywhere on the scale: higher than, lower than, or equal to its showing ability. You can test for showing via PT testing, but the only way to find out how strong a breeder a horse is is, quite simply, to wait and breed it.

Remember, it is the sire and dam's breeding ability that determines these numbers. It doesn't matter if they themselves are poor show horses. In fact, many foundation horses excel at one thing are fantastically poor at the other. They are great show horses and poor breeders, or great breeders and negative showers. (No, really, there are foundation horses that have negative PT scores.) This random factor is why you will never be able to reliably predict whether a given foal will be showing-recommended or not.

The only common factor that exists between a lined foal's breeding and showing ability is that these scores were produced by the same general set of numbers. Horses that produce strong showing animals will produce strong breeders, although not every foal will be both. In my experience, most horses are better at showing than breeding, even when there isn't enough of a difference for them to be tagged by SAT. You cannot look at a horse's PT score and know how good of a breeder it will be. It is absolutely impossible. If a horse is substantially better at showing than breeding, then Lucas will say so in show aptitude testing. Nobody knows how close the margin is.

So go on. Say it one more time.
Showing ability and breeding ability are not related.