Showing or schooling?

Hi all! I´m back after 2-3 years. I´ve seen now you can put your horses on riding schools and they gain stats also. What is better? Showwing or schooling?

^{Showing has a higher overall stat gain in a lifetime for 5+ entries while riding school is lower but more reliable. Riding school is only intended for horses that won't do well in shows, i.e horses with over 75 non-speciality stats.} 

Thank you very much!

Do showing horses gain stats with every show they enter or only if they place 1st, 2nd or 3rd?

They only have a chance of gaining stats from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place if there are 5 or more entries in a show. The stats are not a guarantee. However, my horses are almost exclusively shown vs. riding school and as long as they show every day that they are not locked they do pretty well with stat gain throughout their lifetime. 

Last edited on 2020-03-10 at 10:46:09 by Olympea

I tend to show horses when their stats are on the top of their level (e.g. 875-899 for R3 - when they are slowly reaching the next level), otherwise I school them.
It's a good solution if you've got many horses in the same specialisation - they don't get in each others' way during shows (as only the first 3 places get stat increase) and they have a guaranteed small stat increase when they'd be unlikely to win anyway.
The downside of this method is that you have to spend quite a lot of time showing/schooling horses because you have to conciously monitor their stats to decide whether they go to show today or they'll be schooled. Otherwise it's working pretty well for my horses and gives you a guaranteed profit too :)

I do the same thing Thunder does and I find it works pretty well, especially since I've got so many endurance horses at similar levels. I show the top 3 to 5 (or maybe 6 or 7 if I can push the show to run sooner with another entry). Otherwise I school the rest. Once one moves up a grade, I incorporate another horse into showing. I've found this works really well for both the horses and profit.