When you look at a contest player’s decisions in a vacuum it’s easy to jump to conclusions about how they played. But in reality, you can’t properly evaluate a player’s decision in a contest until you understand what their goals are.Let’s take two recent examples, starting with the Belmont Stakes Challenge. The leaderboard of Belmont’s big contest showed Jonathon Kinchen in second place with $30,000. He’d been solidly behind Justify on the DRF Players’ Podcast so when the big horse won, many listeners assumed that he’d won as well. Yet when the scores were posted, his name was nowhere to be found. Over the next few days, I received several texts that were variations on a theme: “What the heck was he thinking?”First of all, you have to realize the way scores are tabulated on the NYRA leaderboards. The contest allowed doubles, but when you bet a double, the money isn’t deducted from the bankroll until the second leg is completed. In reality, despite what the leaderboard said, Kinchen was already zeroed the minute Spring Quality’s win in the Manhattan was made official. He’d played a double using Sadler’s Joy and others to Justify, in an attempt to get his bankroll close to $100,000.Why $100,000? Well, that’s the score that Faron McCubbins won the 2017 Belmont contest with. McCubbins was one of several players near Kinchen on the leaderboard he believed would be willing to fire it all in pursuit of a win. The guess of $100,000 as the final score seems almost comically high when you see that Karen Casey won the day with $38,000. But you have to remember that the low winning score – Casey herself guessed $75,000 would win – was likely the result of two longshots in two key spots. Had Spring Quality not won or had Gronkowski not run second in the Belmont, it’s nearly certain the scores would have been more where Casey guessed at least if not all the way to Kinchen’s assumed total.In the Belmont contest, the prize pool is tilted toward the top. There was a $35,000 difference between first and second. Throw in the emotional value of an outright win in a major live-bankroll contest – something Kinchen has never achieved – and his decision to go for the gusto makes a lot more sense. He was trying to turn his strong opinion on Justify, a 3-5 shot, into something like a 7-2 shot. That’s bet-of-the-year type stuff.One week after the Belmont contest, Kinchen won over $20,000 at the Santa Anita June Challenge – not a major win, though still a nice cash. But the interesting story this time around comes from second-place finisher Paul Matties Jr.Matties ran second in the contest, and had the option of taking home, in addition to cash, either a Pegasus World Cup Betting Championship seat or a seat to the National Horseplayers’ Championship. Players focused on expected value alone would grab the Pegasus seat, which can be converted to $12,000 in cash come next year’s Pegasus tournament. The NHC seat costs $3,500 to Santa Anita, and would be worth somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 to most horseplayers, depending on how much they value the opportunity and experience of being at the NHC.But for Matties, a professional horseplayer, the decision to take the NHC seat makes perfect sense. He plays in a handful of contests, but is not a contest regular like Kinchen. He might easily miss the 2019 NHC if he didn’t take the seat at this opportunity. Remember, the NHC is the one contest you can’t buy into – you have to win your way in through a qualifying event like this one.For Matties, a returning NHC champion, it’s also reasonable to assume that the seat has a greater emotional value than $12,000 anyway. Not only must it be a great experience to return to Las Vegas having won the biggest prize, but he now has a chance to do something truly spectacular: become the first two-time winner in that event’s history.