Oxer Strategy: Placing Strides and Jumping Clear

Updated October 2026

Oxer is a showjumping round with only one control: hold to speed the horse up, release to let it slow down. That sounds too simple to be hard, until you notice that the horse never responds to the button where you expect. The secret is that every stride is decided when it starts, so you are always steering one hoofprint ahead. This guide lays out the numbers behind strides, take-offs and fence heights, explains how faults and the clock combine into your score, and shows how a careful rider can go clear on every course.

How a stride is decided

The horse's speed always lies between 4.6 and 9.2 metres per second. Holding the bar pulls it towards the top of that range, releasing pulls it towards the bottom, and the change is smooth rather than instant: the speed closes about three quarters of the gap in each second, so a full swing from slowest to fastest takes a little under two seconds to mostly complete.

A stride's length is set from the speed you have at the instant a hoof touches down, and then it is frozen. A slow horse covers about 3 metres per stride and a flat-out horse about 4.75 metres, with everything in between in a straight line. Whatever you do with the bar during a stride changes the speed you will have when that stride lands, and therefore the length of the following stride. The landing spot of the current stride is already fixed.

The chevrons painted ahead of the horse are a forecast of up to five landings. The first is the stride already in progress and will not move. The others assume your current speed stays exactly as it is, so while you are still accelerating or slowing down they keep sliding. Read them as "where I am heading if I stop changing pace now", and expect them to creep forward for a moment after you press and back after you let go.

The take-off band and what makes a clean jump

In front of each fence is a shaded band 3.8 metres deep. If any stride lands inside it, the horse jumps from there. A chevron that would land in the band is drawn green; one that would land beyond the fence line is drawn red, and that one means trouble. Inside the band is a brighter strip, from 3.0 to 1.6 metres before the fence, which marks the best part of it.

Whether the jump is clean depends on two numbers multiplied together: how far from the fence you took off and how fast you were going at that moment. The height of the jump peaks for a take-off 2.3 metres out and falls away smoothly in both directions: at the outer edge of the band it is down to well under half of the peak, and in the last 0.4 metres before the fence it drops to nothing. It also scales directly with speed. Fences are between 1.05 and 1.30 metres tall, and if the jump is lower than the top rail, the rail falls for 4 faults.

The practical consequences are worth memorising:

• Slow is never safe on big fences. At the minimum speed even a perfect take-off reaches only about 1.26 metres, so the 1.30 fences cannot be cleared at a crawl at all, and on a 1.25 the margin is about a centimetre.
• Speed buys room. On a 1.30 fence the clean take-off window runs from about 1.2 to 3.4 metres out at 7 metres per second, and widens to roughly 1.0 to 3.6 metres at full gallop.
• Low fences are forgiving. A 1.05 can be cleared from about 1.5 to 3.1 metres out even at the slowest pace.

While the horse is in the air, the bar does nothing. It lands 2.6 metres past the fence at the speed it took off with, and your control resumes from there.

Refusals, the gap past the band, and how faults add up

A refusal happens when a stride would land on or past the fence line, which means the stride before it fell just short of the band and the next one was long enough to jump over the whole band. It costs 4 faults. The horse is then brought back to 19 metres before the same fence at the slowest pace and you approach again, with the clock still running. A third refusal at the same fence adds 8 more faults on top of its own 4 and skips the fence, so three refusals at one obstacle cost 20 faults in total.

Here is the key geometry. The band is 3.8 metres deep, a slow stride is 3 metres and a fast one is 4.75. Any stride that starts below about 6.7 metres per second is shorter than the band is deep, so it cannot step over the band; at that pace the horse is bound to land inside it. A faster horse can step clean over the band, and in our simulation holding the bar flat out the whole way produced about one and a half refusals per ten-fence round. When you see the last chevron before the band landing just outside it, let go at once.

Ten fences make a course. They are spaced 16 to 25 metres apart, and the time allowed works out at roughly one second for every 6.6 metres of course, usually between 29 and 38 seconds. Every second or part of a second over that limit adds one fault.

How the score is ranked

Your result is faults first and time second. Internally the game multiplies faults by a thousand and adds your time in tenths of a second, so one extra fault is worse than any amount of time saved, and among equal-fault rounds the faster one ranks higher. Lower is better, and both the best on your device and the Hall of Fame use this order. The clock starts as soon as you press Start, so the round is already being timed before your first touch.

What our simulation showed

We ran the game's own physics on 300 random courses with three styles of riding. Never touching the bar took 48 seconds on average against about 33 seconds allowed, collected 15 time faults and dropped about seven rails per round. Holding the bar for the whole round was fast, around 28.5 seconds, but averaged 1.5 refusals and 2 rails, for about 14 faults. A rider that planned each approach a few strides ahead, holding about three quarters of the time and easing off only to fix the distance, went clear on all 300 courses with an average time of 27.8 seconds, well inside the limit. Its take-offs clustered between 2.0 and 2.5 metres before the fence.

The lesson is that a clear round and a fast round are the same round. You do not need to be cautious; you need to be early.

A technique for every approach

1. Gallop by default. Hold between fences. Speed both covers the course and raises the jump.
2. Look at the chevrons as soon as the next fence's band appears. The view reaches about 16 metres ahead of the horse, which is three or four strides at full gallop.
3. If the green chevron sits in the bright strip, keep holding. Nothing needs fixing.
4. If a red chevron appears, release. Shorter strides will put an extra hoofprint inside the band. Release early: a stride already under way cannot change.
5. If the green chevron sits very close to the fence, shorten a stride or two earlier. Shorter strides move the take-off back out towards the bright strip. If it sits at the far edge instead, longer strides would pull it in; when you are already flat out, simply stay on the bar, because at full speed even a 1.30 clears from 3.6 metres out.
6. Never arrive slow at a tall fence. If you have to shorten, do it two strides out and be back on the bar for the final stride.

A practice plan

Start with a few rounds where you ignore the clock completely and only watch the chevrons, saying "in", "deep" or "red" at each fence. Then ride rounds with the goal of zero refusals, accepting the odd rail. Once refusals have gone, focus on arriving at the bright strip with the bar held. Finally, chase the time: with zero faults the only thing separating two rounds is tenths of a second, and those come from holding the bar between fences rather than from risky take-offs.