The fantasy sports game Supercoach Racing is back for the Autumn 2020 season. Select a stable of horses and their real-life feats will contribute to your fantasy points total. Making it harder is that you have a budget to work to and the likeliest horses to win the most lucrative races cost more. Astute picking for value can see you score more points per dollar and as - your horses win - your budget can rise each week. The stable with the highest total will win....absolutely nothing, it seems. So it's for the glory!(?)

https://supercoach.foxsports.com.au...sic/team/select

February 21, 2020 - Registrations open

March 7, 2020 (round 1) - Competition begins - Flemington (MEL) - Randwick (SYD)

March 14, 2020 (round 2) - Caulfield (MEL) - Rosehill (SYD)

March 20-21, 2020 (round 3) - Moonee Valley (MEL) - Rosehill (SYD)

March 28, 2020 (round 4) - Rosehill (SYD)

April 4, 2020 (round 5) - Randwick (SYD)

April 11, 2020 (round 6) - Randwick (SYD)

April 18, 2020 (round 7) - Randwick (SYD) This is of course in addition to the NRL and AFL fantasy competitions which begin on the 12th and 19th March respectively.

Round 1 Lockout is at 12:20pm.

I'm trying something different and my stable (pre-scratchings) is:
Nature Strip (c)
Standout
Muntaseera
Tagaloa
Rubisaki
Larimer Street
Ole Kirk
Minhaaj
Farman
Supreme Idea

I have no idea why you can't easily download the horse pricing info from someplace...

Swapped Captain to Standout due to odds changes.

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....

Alligator Blood (c)
Probabeel
Sylvia's Mother
Funstar
Master Of Wine
Ilovemyself
Kaakit Akit
Rainbow Thief
Kumasi
Celestial Sol

I scored 153pts this week. I had predicted 190, but that was largely contingent on my captain's score. I'd anticipated Alligator Blood likely adding around 50pts to my total; he added 8pts. Sylvia's Mother was also a top-3 pick for me: 0 points to the total.

Better news with my jockey choice: James McDonald who scores 3-2-1 for 1st-2nd-3rd finishes, ended up with 15pts for the day. He outscored 6 of my horses!

254 - over 100 greater than my score - was the highest of the round. But I was still in the top 16% of the week and my overall ranking dropped only slightly to 726th out of just over 13k.