Cracking the Zed Run code

Let me first start by saying that I love horses. Ever since my first race with my good friend, Debbie Hawkins in Singapore, I’ve always been fascinated with the magnificent creature and the king of sports. Always wanted to own a horse, but you literally need to be a “king” to own one! The costs and commitment involved are just astounding. The one horse that I’ll always remember is Star Over The Bay, having watched him race in Singapore running in the Singapore Airline International Cup at Kranji. However, that wasn’t a good story. He fractured his right foreleg and had to be euthanized. I did stop going to races for quite a long while after that, but interest in the sports remains.

Let’s get it out of the way. It’s not the betting. Winning the bet is one thing, but nominating the right horse for the right race, and winning at it, it’s a different kind of feeling. For that, you really have to understand the horse and all the other parameters that come into play. It’s a little like stats with baseball, and thinking that you can crack the code with numbers.

Zed Run is this digital horse racing game built on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain which allows owners of NFT (non-fungible token) horses to race. These NFT horses are essentially unique and they have their own characteristics making the game interesting.

As with real horses, the bloodline and performance of these NFT horses determine their value and there is a real open market in which they can be traded. What’s more, you can actually breed these horses resulting in new NFT horses being “minted”. (Yes, NFTs are minted!)

Unlike real horses, Zed Run is a lot more accessible for everyone. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some mind-blowing transactions that took place, like the NFT Horse that sold for US$125K! To think that you would drop that type of money on an in-game digital asset is something that I can’t imagine myself doing.

According to discussions online, you can wait for “drops” to happen where there are new horses to be released, or for breeding season to be in where you can buy newly bred horses from other stables. However, if you decide to just jump in and get some action, you’ll need to hit the open market. So, I decided to check out how much would it cost me if I were to buy a horse on opensea.io if I were to just pick the cheapest one to get a taste of the action.

At the point of writing, the lowest priced horse costs 0.12 Ethereum. We had a bit of a drop in crypto price over the last few days, and with Ethereum currently at around U$2,255, this horse would have cost me US$270. You might have to factor in some extras for “gas” with the Ethereum transactions.

However, would I have a winning horse? Logically speaking, if the horse is a winner, they would probably be priced at a premium.

Now, the reason why I liked the sport, it’s the amount of stats that comes with it. So, let’s just say if I’m buying a horse and I wanted to actually win in races. Yes, there are other reasons why you would buy a horse. For example, you wanted to breed and make babies!

The first place to start is Zed Run’s community page. There’s a bunch of useful information there that can get you familiar with the game. I’m not going to cover that here as it’ll be repeating.

The next important site to check out is this website called “Know your horses”. You can pull out stats for any Zed Run horses and there are some common views that you can cut and analyze the data by.

As I was looking through the stats of the different horses, I needed to find one that I can work with. Also keeping in mind that if I’m going to be realistic with a budget, I probably shouldn’t be looking at the top end, meaning instead of looking at a Nakamoto, I would probably be looking at getting a Buterin. Also, if I’m looking to race, I probably wouldn’t mind going for something lower than a Genesis.

Last but not least, we want something that’s got a bunch of data that we can work with. While an unraced horse has that element of surprise, it can also mean there’s absolutely no data to suggest if it can run. So, I’ll pick a horse with at least a thousand races, so I’ll have enough data points to work with.

With the parameters in mind, I set out to look for a horse. Now, I’m not buying one yet, but here’s the fun part. Before you determine if it’s a good horse (for racing — remember, you might not want to race but want to breed), I want to be sure that I will win some races and at the right price.

I had some help. Psyduck’s a horse owned by a friend of mine from “SB | Road To 66”. He’s helped me a lot with understanding how the game works and also shown me some fantastic horses.

Why would I pick this horse to analyze?

• Bloodline: This is a Buterin. This is the lowest tier bloodline so technically cost would be most affordable.
• Breed: He’s an “Elite”. There are 6 tiers in this, and he’s at the 4th tier from the top.
• Gender: He’s a Colt, and honestly, it doesn’t matter cause we’re looking to race.
• Number of races: He’s got over a thousand races so plenty of data points for me to analyze.
• Average price: His average price on Opensea.io is 0.4153 Eth. That’s about US$936. If I’m working with a $1,000 budget, I’ll have some leftover to enter him for races. (Note: It’s probably a bad idea to go so close to the budget as you probably want to set aside more money. I don’t think SB will sell Psyduck for that price!)
• Win/ Place/ Show percentage and ROI: He’s got close to a 30% Show percentage and a positive ROI. This is an indication of a horse that can run and win.

Not forgetting the “U-shaped” chart which everyone talks about. You want to get a horse with this curve as they would win a lot and lose a lot keeping them in lower class races but also winning the stakes. As compared to having an “inverted U-shaped” curve, coming in the middle doesn’t make you any money, and you don’t drop to lower class races. That means you’ll be stuck with stronger competition which probably is the reason why you’re not winning.

After picking a horse, Psyduck, I wanted to dig deeper and get a better understanding of the horse. I used “Know Your Horses” to pull the race data out and did a bit more analysis. What I found was quite interesting and I began to understand why Psyduck is a good horse to race with.

Disclaimer: At this point in time, the gates and the weather/ track condition don’t play a part in the races, so it’s most probably distance.

First, I wanted to get a feel of how fast Psyduck runs, so I did a view on his speed across the different distances. It felt like he’s a sprinter made for the 1000m to 1400m races. That gave me an idea of his preference. However, I could be wrong.

So I decided to zoom in on races where Psyduck’s came in top 3. Remember, we picked him for having a Show % of near 30%. I’m expecting to see a higher level of Show in a certain distance race. Based on the above table, it felt like it could be the 1000m to 1400m races. Considering that he’s going much faster in those distances. (Also keeping in mind that speed tends to be lower in longer distance races).

I was quite surprised when I saw this. It felt like the numbers were quite well distributed. If this horse is a sprinter, how is he winning at 2400m? I decided to dig deeper.

I wanted to see what the % Shows for Psyduck across the different distances, and also his % Wins. This really surprised me. He’s getting a higher percentage at the longer distance races compared to the shorter distances ones.

Based on this table, if we run Psyduck more in the 2000m to 2400m distance races, would we have a better yield? (Something for SB to try I guess)

Finally, I wanted to see if there could be races where Psyduck is obviously running out of his league. For this, I used the odds to give me a sense of his competition for those races.

This throws another spanner into the works. Based on the average odds, it looks like his best races should be in the 1600m to 2000m. However, it can also be said that the avg odds across the distances are fairly consistent. Can there really be a horse that’s good across all distances?

What’s my conclusion?

This is where the game is still a bit of a black box for me. In real-life horse racing, there are a lot of factors that go into the result of a race. However, with Zed Run, we know that a lot of those factors are not in play (yet). However, are there horses that just can run and horses that just can’t run? I don’t know. I guess I would need to do more analysis on other horses to see how they run.

For now, I would love to see Psyduck run in longer distance races and compare those results to my analysis. I feel that he could yield a lot more in the longer distances.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the article and found it useful. I’m still learning this game and stay fascinated with the gameplay. Would love to hear what you think of this game and also your thoughts on the future of such NFT games.

Source: https://erickywongsg.medium.com/cracking-the-zed-run-code-a3e4d530253f?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency