HGG Community Forums

Don’t use PT as a score on your breeders. You want the best paper level. Pt has nothing to do with the quality of a horse for breeding. If you prioritize paper, the pt will follow.

Unfortunately the only way to know your paper level is to comparison test when they are in the same level. When you start out one of the easiest ways to weed out horses to not test is Strict Breeding Advice. This may cull all of your foals, however.

Make sure foals are superior in paper to their parents. Either by the grade going higher, or by testing then against their parents.

1) all of the systems have a 1% error margin. So 2 horses that test aga, won’t necessarily test aga against a third horse. Let’s say Horse 1 tests aga horse2. But horse 3 might test worse to horse 1, but aga horse 2. This is why I have a tier system for testing.

There is a cap on breeding ability: a horse must be at the cap in order to produce 15 pt foals. SBA was recently changed so that horses at the breeding cap can pass it, even if their parents are boosted above it. A boosted horse can still only produce foals at the breeding cap.

When you get to gold there are more tiers of breeding ability than there are in any of the other tiers combined. That’s why we now have ** values for gold. These are new.

Also bear with me. I am currently at work on mobile but I will try to answer your questions as best as I can. :) I will also use breeding score(paper/ability) interchangeably. My brain is bad.


I wouldn’t worry about the main percentages, as they will likely confuse you.

Yellow/red/blue/gold/gold**/gold*** for mares
C/b/a/star/star**/star*** for studs

The breeding cap is about halfway between ** and ***. Horses cannot be a *** without being boosted.


There’s isn’t a hard cap on PT score. But as breeding score goes up, so does the Pt that horse can produce. Usually they can produced about 1pt above where they are. Because the breeding score (paper) is capped, the pt will not go above 15 pt naturally.

You can boost 10% above the breeding cap by double boosting. This allows clones to possibly gain 15.3 pt. But it’s random chance.

When you clone pt score can go up, down, or stay the same.

If you want your breeding program to continue going up, I suggest only breeding foals who test superior to their parents.

The breeding cap isn't so significant in newer era's, but if you are continually keeping superior breeders, so superior to sire and/or dam, eventually you will hit the cap. Which is as pestilenttempest said, is a high **Gold or **Star. If you have a **Star that is superior to another **Star, chances are it's pretty close to the cap.

Tier testing as pestilenttempest described it, is just comparison testing to a number of known level stallions. So if have an A papered stallion for instance and want to work out if he is a high A or a low A, I might compare to a low A or high B, and if superior to both, then I could compare to a mid A etc, until I know where my new A stallion is

So that would mean top tier or high level of whatever paper level is essentially the same, due to the genetic and random components of inheritance?

Yea and no. The 1% will often show in the offspring of the horse:

Let’s say you have two horses that are at/nearingthe cap. Horse 1 is the breeding cap. Horse 2 tests slightly worse than one, but aga other cap horses. Horse 1 can produce foals at the 15 pt cap. Horse 2 might only be able to produce horses up to 14.9. ((I’ve seen this quite a bit in bootstrap breeding, which is the example that comes to mind)) horse 1s foals, if not at the cap, have the ability to be 1% better paper wise than horse 2. Over the generations you will see faster improvement with horse 1.

I wouldn’t stress about the 1% too much until you get to higher levels, as long as they are superior to their parents. (Except for cap horses, of course) It’s more of a min/max thing for those of us pushing our lines as hard as possible. Aka, the ones who push 3 generations to breeding cap, or are double boosting. There are a few of us that do way too much testing/pushing for our own good. I have spent a ridiculously long time /money getting my system into place. There have been multiple studs I’ve put 30million+ into just in testing to prove to myself exactly how a system works. That inevitably gets changed anyway. ^_^

If you have 2 horses that are within 1% of each other, you could always choose the ones that get your preferred genes. In the end, it’s a very minimal difference that you will only notice if you are paying a lot of attention. (Like adding 1 extra generation to get to the breeding cap)

in the long run, it’s more about what you prioritize? I can pay to gmt anything, any way that I want, so I cut every possible corner that I can. Somebody else would be better off with breeding genes in earlier because they don’t have access to the gmts that I do. I usually gmt my 3rd gens homozygous for genes for that line and never have to touch them again if I don’t start with 2 gmtd foundations.