Faults
0
Best
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Ride a showjumping round with one lever: speed. Your stride length is set the instant each stride begins, so the pace you hold now decides where the next hoof lands.
A showjumping round controlled by a single lever. Hold the bar at the bottom of the screen and the horse gallops on; let go and it comes back to a shorter, steadier pace. There is nothing else to press.
What makes it a game is that a stride is fixed at the moment it begins. Whatever speed you happen to be carrying when a hoof lands decides how long the next stride will be, and once that stride is under way nothing can change it. So the pace you hold right now is not adjusting this stride, it is placing the next hoofprint. The pale chevrons drawn on the ground ahead of the horse show exactly where the next four strides will land if you keep doing what you are doing.
The shaded band in front of each fence is the take-off zone, and the brighter strip inside it is the best part of it. Land a stride anywhere in the band and the horse jumps. Land past the fence line instead and it is a refusal, four faults, and you come round for another approach. Three refusals at the same fence and you skip it for eight faults and move on.
How cleanly you jump depends on two things at once: where in the band you took off, and how fast you were travelling. Near the middle of the band with a good gallop clears any fence on the course. Too deep, too far away, or too slow and a rail comes down for four faults. There are ten fences and a time allowed, with one extra fault for every second you go over it. Your score is faults first, then the clock as a tiebreak, and lower is better.
Ride the fence before the one in front of you. Because a stride is locked in as it begins, whatever you do with the bar now only shows up one hoofprint later. Beginners hold on right up to the take-off and wonder why the horse still met the fence badly; the speed that mattered was the one you were carrying two chevrons ago. Watch the marks, not the horse.
The dangerous place is not the fence, it is the gap just beyond the band. If a stride lands a little further out than the take-off zone, the next one has to cover that whole distance plus the zone, and a long stride will easily carry past the fence line into a refusal. The moment you see a chevron landing just short of the band, shorten immediately: a slow horse takes a short stride and can slot an extra one in, while a fast horse has no way to fit it.
Speed does two opposite jobs. It lengthens the stride, which is how you fix a distance that is coming up wrong, and it also adds height to the jump, which is how you clear the taller fences. That means the cheap mistake is arriving perfectly but slowly: a dead centre take-off at a crawl still drops a rail on a one metre thirty. When the distance is already sorted, gallop on.
The clock is usually the smaller half of the score, but it is not free. One fault a second adds up faster than people expect on a long course, and the time allowed assumes a working gallop, not a hack. The best rounds are not careful ones; they are rounds where every approach is settled early enough that you can keep the bar down between fences.