Really wished I didn't!

Ended up with a total of 245pts and placed 655th of 11,500 participants. Had I left the Captain's armband on Nature Strip I would've been 20pts higher in 183rd.

My stable value has now gone up by $75,000. The top stables went up an additional $100k, which is a little disappointing.

Current first place is on 320pts. They filled one spot with the cheapest possible starter. I only had a cut-down list of horses 'cause I needed their prices for my approach and there's no easy way to scrape the site; it was missing from the list and I didn't think to look for cheapies myself. I'll try and figure out how to get a full list of competing horses next week.

I'm also only considering a horse's expected value with respect to them coming first. I should do that for all points-earning places. That cheapie above was in a 6-horse Group 2 race and even coming 5th it got 12pts - as much as my Captain did! I'm sure there used to be a spreadsheet around here somewhere showing the average chance of a horse priced at $x in a field of size y coming in zth place. That could come in handy... Else a Monte Carlo simulation is probably more accurate for a given field.

The other issue I had was in determining the importance of points potential vs value. I could only think of selecting my stable manually and seeing what the expected total would be, or checking every combination automatically. There must be a better way....