Showing or Training?

So I apologize for this very "newbie" question but I haven't played Equiverse since the 2010 at the very latest and it's changed so much!

Since I'm old school I've been hand entering my foundation stock in shows. But if you send them to the trainer you could get 720 points in 24 hours. My ponies gain anywhere from 230-1,200 points from a day of shows. Is there one thats better than the other?

Again, apologizing if the answer is blatantly obvious.

Are you looking at points specifically?
showing is what gives points.

Training/shows/schooling give stats and member Experience.

Training gives a stat boost a day, then once you get 10 stat boost bars, you can use it to raise the horses stats from 11-13 stat points.

Showing has a chance to grant stats, if your horse places/wins/shows (I think) with high enough entries in the show

Schooling has a chance to get 0-1 stat per hour in the school (10 max).

I personally find schooling to grant stats faster/better/more consistent (check my test horses, they're welshies), but showing gives points and in my experience levels the players account faster.

I think stats more so.. But points are somewhat of a goal for me as well. Can I do schooling for 10 hours and still enter shows?

You can either enter ten shows and do no riding schools, or do ten hours of riding school and enter no shows, or you can do any combination that adds up to no more than ten, such as four shows and six hours of riding school, or nine shows and one hour of riding school.

You can train any horse any day except for horses younger than three, horses that have turned twenty-one, or any pregnant mare.

Pregnant mares also cannot show on the last day of their pregnancy.

Any horse age three or older can be put in a riding school, even if pregnant or twenty-one years old.

Showing tends to give stats the fastest if you have a decent show horse, and is the only way to get horse points. What I'm referring to as a good show horse is any horse that has a low total of stats in the qualities not associated with the horse's specialty. Anything significantly over foundation levels will severely impact your horse's showing power. Also, horses tend to show better when their stat totals are at the higher end of the range of stats in their grade.

You can only get stats from shows that have at least five entries, and you must place in the top three.

If your horse has excessive non-specialty stats, or is in the low end of their grade, or if you cannot find a full enough show, you might consider using the riding school to ensure that your horse will still have a chance of gaining stats.

You should always train your horses every day, when they are eligible for training. Not only does it raise stats, but it also improves your horses' luck.

How weird, my best show horse is my mare that is leveled out in her stats?? She's at 4.1k points where my others average 1-2k

I just took a look at your horses. She has 105 stats total, which means only 5 gained stats - not enough to make a significant difference in showing. Also, showing is not normal right now - there's a bad glitch that is being investigated that causes shows to occasionally not run, so a lot of the better horses in the game are locked or are being put in riding schools, so as not to waste the entry fees.

The longer your horses continue to gain non-specialty stats, the more you will start to see them struggle in shows, especially once shows are fixed and the competition gets stiff again.