This article originally appeared in The Backstretch magazine.

What to Do First

If you're planning to buy at a Thoroughbred auction, you must check in with the sales company's office before the bidding starts--preferably well before the bidding starts.

Sales companies will give short-term credit--very short-term, like two weeks or so--but you have to apply for it in time to permit them to check up on your ability to pay. The time to do that is before you buy, not after. If you plan to pay immediately by check, or even if you plan to pay cash, you still need to check in at the sales office and talk with the chief financial officer before the bidding starts.

After each horse is sold, an "acknowledgment of purchase" (called a "ticket") signed by the winning bidder goes straight to the sales office, where it's carefully scrutinized. If the buyer is unknown to the sales company, the horse could be brought back into the ring and resold.

Your initial visit to the sales office is the time to ask any questions that you may have. Don't be shy; if you're there to buy, they're eager to help you in every way they possibly can.

Bidding
All Thoroughbred auctioneers in the United States employ the traditional chant, which is incomprehensible to anyone who isn't familiar with it. Fortunately, most sales now provide a "bid board," a small scoreboard that shows the amount bid. If you watch that board, you don't have to be able to understand the auctioneer.

However, it's useful to know that the auctioneer is saying only two things:  the amount bid and the amount asked. All the chanting is filler around the "I have" and the "I want" prices.

It's a myth that if you accidentally nod your head or lift your hand, the auctioneer will think it's a bid and you'll own a horse.  You have to make a pretty deliberate effort to have a bid recognized. And unlike art auctions, you don't have to have any kind of identification in order to make a bid. Anyone is permitted to bid.

If you're inexperienced at bidding, by far the best plan is to talk with one of the "bid-spotters" (also called "ringmen") before the sale starts and tell him that you need help in bidding. He'll tell you what to do and carefully shepherd you through the pitfalls.

One thing that may give you trouble is knowing whether your bid is the highest that's been made (whether you're "in," in the jargon of the auction ring). If you aren't sure whether you need to bid again, look questioningly at your bid-spotter (the one you've talked with already) and point to yourself. He'll nod reassuringly if you're "in," and if you're "out," he'll ask you whether you want to bid again.

Everybody has his own idea about tactics in bidding, and I'm no exception. I've had excellent success in waiting until the bidding has gone on for a while, looking for a pause in the bidding, and then jumping in and bidding aggressively up to my limit.

By "aggressively" I mean raising your adversary's bid as quickly as possible, with no hesitation whatsoever. This gambit leads most people to think that they're either bidding against the seller or against an opponent who's determined not to be outbid.  In either case, many bidders will just quit.

In following this plan, it's important not to hesitate when you get near your limit. You don't want to give your competition any reason to think you're weakening. Just bid right up to your limit and stop. It logically follows that in order to carry out that plan, you have to know what your limit is.

Always know how high you're going to bid before the horse enters the ring.  Don't wait until the bidding starts to decide how much you want to pay. The worse time to make that decision is when your adrenaline is gushing and you're feeling the pressure of the battle.

There are hazards in bidding aggressively. One is that the seller--or even the auctioneer--may decide that you're so eager to buy that he can safely bid against you and drive the price higher. But if you wait to enter the battle until the bidding gets somewhere near the horse's value, you aren't likely to have that problem.

The other major negative to bidding aggressively is that you may bid more than was actually necessary to top your adversary, but those losses are minor compared with the advantages of convincing a competing bidder that he's hooked someone who can't be beaten. Many veteran buyers at auction strongly disagree with my approach to bidding; feel free to join them.

If you are the "underbidder" when the hammer falls (if your final bid was topped by only one other bidder) and after some discussion between the auctioneer and the bid spotters it turns out that the winning bidder can't be located, you will be asked if you want the horse for the amount of your last bid.

In that case, there's a pretty good chance that you've been "run" by the auctioneer or the consignor (bidding against you to drive up the price), and you have to decide whether you still want the horse. You don't have to accept, but if you thought the price was right and you like the horse, it's pretty hard to say no. That won't happen to you very often, though.

Before we leave the subject of bidding, let's consider briefly the question of bidding against the consignor. Some people absolutely refuse to continue bidding if they think the consignor is bidding on the horse, an idea that I find completely baffling.  The consignor has a perfect right to act to keep his horse from selling at a price that he considers unacceptable (see "Reserves" below), and you shouldn't bid more than you think is right, anyway, no matter who's bidding against you.

And most important, if the consignor bids on the horse, that means that he's willing to keep the horse if the price isn't satisfactory. After all, it certainly makes more sense to bid on a horse that the consignor is willing to keep than one that he wants to sell no matter how low the price.

If you're the winning bidder, soon after the auctioneer signals the end of the bidding by dropping his hammer, a sales company employee will appear with a ticket for you to sign. That ticket is actually a contract binding the consignor to sell you the horse and binding you to purchase it, so check carefully to be sure that the number of the horse and the price are what you thought they were.

If they aren't, explain what you think is wrong and don't sign the ticket until you're sure that the horse is the one you wanted and the price is what you bid. If they aren't, don't sign the ticket. Until you sign that ticket, you're not obligated to purchase. You may be scolded by the auctioneer and publicly embarrassed, but you won't own a horse that you don't want.

One final note about bidding:  Don't wait until the hammer is about to fall before you make your first bid. Until he sees that you're interested in the horse, your bid spotter may be slow in picking up your bid, so don't cut it too close.

Reserves
"Consignors" (sellers) in any auction have the right to set a price below which they won't sell. That price is called a "reserve."

Sometimes the auctioneer will be advised of the consignor's reserve and will pretend to have bids until the reserve price is reached. Sometimes the consignor will just make his own bids, or have someone bid for him.  But either way, whether it's formally entered in writing with the sales company or exercised informally by personal bidding, it's called a "reserve."

Either way, you won't be able to buy the horse for less than the consignor is willing to accept, and it's neither illegal nor improper for him to bid against you.

However, if you are the winning bidder and sign the ticket, the horse is yours, regardless of what the reserve price may have been. (Assuming, of course, that you pay for it.)

Catalogs
Sale catalogs are given free to just about anyone who asks for one, either by mail in advance of the sale or at the sale site.

It's important to remember that these catalogs are meant to balance the interests of both the buyer and the seller, so don't expect them to contain every piece of information you'd like to have. Sometimes, in fact, the sale catalogs are deliberately written so that flaws in the horses' pedigrees are minimized.  Catalogs never tell outright lies, but they are filled with half-truths.

Sale catalogs devote a full page to each horse entered in the sale, and horses are numbered consecutively by what is called "hip number."  That term comes from the fact that for identification purposes a number is placed on each horse's hip before he enters the ring. Those numbers, of course, correspond to the numbers in the catalog.

Sale catalog pages consist of four parts, as follows:

1. The pedigree, the thing that looks like the draw for a tennis tournament, which shows the ancestry of the horse being sold.

2. The sire paragraph, which gives a condensed report of the race and sire records of the male parent of the horse being sold.

3.The produce of the "tail female line" of the horse being sold. ("Tail female" means that the only horses considered are the females along the bottom line of the pedigree.)

4. Other information. Depending upon the type of horse being sold, this could include the race record, the produce and pregnancy status (if it's a broodmare), stakes nominations (if it's a racing prospect), and other such things.

The most complicated part of the catalog page is #3, which shows the horses descended from the first dam (the mother of the horse for sale), the second dam (the maternal grandmother of the horse for sale), and so on. Once you understand that indentions to the right indicate different generations, you won't have too much trouble.

For example, the name of the first horse below the first dam on a catalog page will be indented slightly to the right, showing that it's a son or daughter of the first dam. If that offspring is a female, another indention to the right would indicate an offspring of that daughter of the first dam, and so on.

Reading the catalog isn't especially hard.  Understanding the significance of what you read--and what to do about it--is not only hard, it's the whole ballgame.

Black Type
Boldface type (also called "black type") is an important feature of sale catalog pages, and the term "black type" is an important part of the Thoroughbred vocabulary.

Sale catalogs print in boldface type the names of horses that have won or placed in stakes races.  If the horse has won a stakes race, his name is printed completely in capital letters. If he's finished second or third in a stakes race, his name is printed in capitals and lower case.

(Only about 3 percent of Thoroughbreds win stakes races, so you can see that black type denotes membership in an exclusive group.)

Until just a few years ago, black type was awarded for any race that required a nomination fee, as well as a few invitational races that were considered to be the equivalent of stakes races. Under those rules, races with purses of less than a thousand dollars could qualify for black type.

Under that system, the Kentucky Derby and the Elmer's Pancake House Handicap at Les Bois Park were rated equally. Since those rules were not applied retroactively, those cheap races still get black type if they were run before the rules were changed, but now races have to carry a minimum amount of added money in order to qualify for black type.

One thing that has helped in this regard is the "grading" of stakes races, begun in 1973.  Those of superior quality are called "graded stakes," and they are identified in sale catalogs as "Gr. 1," "Gr. 2," and "Gr. 3," abbreviations for "Grade 1" (the best), "Grade 2," and "Grade 3."

After You Buy
Buying a horse is only the beginning. You have to do something with that horse that you've just bought.

Unless you've brought your own horse trailer, you'll have to make arrangements for someone else to move your horse from the sale grounds. Vanning company representatives attend all sales, and--for a price, of course--they'll transport your horse to its new home.

If you can't locate a vanner, check with the sale office and they'll help you locate one. But don't delay; the longer you wait to line up transportation, the harder it will be. Experienced buyers start looking for transportation as soon as they've signed the purchase ticket.

It's customary for consignors to care for the horses they sell until the day following the sale, but they don't always do that. If you want your new possession to be fed and watered, you'd better make sure that the consignor will take care of it, and if he won't, you'll have to see that it's done. In many cases, the vanner who's going to haul your horse will see that the horse is cared for, but you have to ask.  It won't happen automatically.

Most sales require a "stable release," a kind of passport for a horse to leave the sale grounds, which is given to the buyer by the sales company after satisfactory arrangements for payment have been made.

All sales companies permit you to have pregnant ("in foal") mares examined by a veterinarian in order to determine that they really are pregnant. Such examinations must be made within 24 hours of purchase and before the mare has been moved from the sale grounds.

If she was sold as being in foal and isn't as represented, you can report that fact to the sales company and the sale will be canceled. The same goes for an "open" mare (one that isn't in foal) sold for breeding purposes that is found by a veterinarian not to have all the necessary reproductive organs or isn't "apparently free of vaginal infection," or words to that effect.

Other than those breeding soundness warranties, you have little recourse if you find something you don't like about the horse that you've bought. If you buy a horse that's badly conformed, or even one's that's lame, it's assumed that you knew what you were doing. You might win a lawsuit, but it wouldn't be easy and it certainly wouldn't be cheap.

The best thing by far is to follow the Golden Rule of auctions:  Inspect the horse carefully before you bid.