Multiple Class Results using ECHO and NHC 2014

[Patrick_Blaney1]

Dear John,

I am intrigued by the complexity and breadth of the questions posed to you on this forum, and now have a far great appreciation of how good (and versatile) a programme Sailwave has become and how much of its capabilities are still not fully appreciated by many of us who try to use it in our own clubs.

I am also amazed by the speed and quality of your responses to all of us who try to make it work for our unique racing and results setup, thank you seems totally inadequate but a lot of what you all do is, I am afraid, somewhat beyond my mathematical and computer skills so I struggle to keep up but enjoy trying and I know that if I persist I will get there.

Now for my turn to ask a few questions of you, and ,hopefully, I will attach the .blw file which shows what I have done in processing results so you can see both my output and what I have done and whether I am doing things correctly or in the most appropriate way.

By way of introduction, I am re-inputting all the 2013 seasons results into Sailwave, using both the handicaps calculated by our 2013 handicap committee, and then using the 2014 RYA NHC handicapping formula. My objective is to run the entire 2013 season this way and then compare the end handicaps/results to see what differences there would have been had we applied NHC and thus, hopefully, prove that using RYA NHC would have produced a better (and more equitable) outcome – or failing that explain why not. I plan to then use the 2013 output as the starting point for the 2014 results, again using the NHC 2014 scoring methodology, and bring things forward from there. I have to get this all done by the end of April 2014 as we have agreed to use existing handicaps until then.

I have started out by re-doing the April 2013 Series Results. Once I have that series set up and sorted out properly then I am going to run the 4 other series which have up to 50% larger fleets, maximum of 50+ boats, using the April Series as template.

In April 2013, we had 2 Classes of Cruisers, Class 1 (12 boats) and Class 2 (10 boats), which start 15 minutes apart but sail the same course. These boats come from 2 different clubs, ISC and GSC.

Not all the boats in our fleet are of types identifiable in the list of handicaps available under RYA NHC, so I start with an immediate disadvantage of being unable to get Base NHC Handicaps for all boats. For this reason, and because these boats have raced for the past five years, and their handicaps do reflect how they have performed in that period, I wanted to start out using the opening ECHO handicaps instead of the NHC RYA Base handicaps. However, I would like to get the best RYA details by boat type – if I can and have a project to visit every boat and see if I can cross reference it with the RYA listings.

For each Class – which I have called a Starting Class (using the Division Column in Sailwave), I simply list boats and handicaps by Class, whether Class 1 or 2.

We give results in each Class and on a Combined Class basis, so I set up an alias for each boat in a Combined Class (also a Starting Class) so that I could produce results for that Combined Class – again using the ECHO handicaps established by the 2013 Handicap Committee. I thus have 3 sets of results, Class 1, Class 2 and Combined Class.

I then set up another alias on a Combined Class basis, this time using NHC as the scoring system, but used the ECHO handicaps as the starting handicaps. I didn’t try to use the ECHO handicaps as the NHC Base Handicaps but because I had populated the ECHO handicaps in the Rating Column before I created the alias, I assume that it just took the ECHO handicaps as populated as the “base” handicaps?

I then put in the finish time by boat and scored each race. This output “proved” the ECHO Sailwave Results against the 2013 Results already calculated, so I knew that Sailwave was working as intended.

The results also were proceeded using the NHC Scoring System, and this, as expected, changed the handicaps after each race in accordance with the standard formulae in the NHC programme, and so produces a slightly different result both by race and in the series. The changes were not very significant – but the principle explanation was that a lot of boats were unable to compete in all of the 5 races in one case because of the wedding of one of our members (on a Saturday during the racing season!) and in the other, the funeral of a friend of many of our sailors.

When I score the series (and I use the Club Mode External) it gives out several error messages, both saying that there is no start for 2 Class 1 boats in any of the 5 races when (in both cases) these 2 boats (Double Jeopardy and Scorpio Jnr) have had finish times input and thus either been scored in a race or been coded as DNC/DNF.

Notwithstanding this error message, both boats are included in the NHC Results and their handicaps are adjusted for the following race – as one would expect.

So, my questions?

1.   Is what I have done correct and if so why do I get the error message?
   

2.   How do I find the handicaps calculated by NHC after Race 5? When I sort the results by race ratings I cannot see the column for the next races rating? I did add an extra race (Race 6), as seems to have been suggested in recent posts, but nothing showed up?
   

3.   Assuming I just copy the April Series as the Pro-Forma for the May Series (adding the 20 or so additional boats required), and deleted the April 2013 individual races, do I simply copy the final NHC Handicaps into the Rating Column and then input the May Race details and score the series as before?

[Sailwave]

Hi Patrick,

Have a look at the attached file, which solves the problem of the missing starts. The message was correct in that many of the Aliases were not in starts. One thing that does cause some confusion is the use of the word Class

Mark posted last month an extract from ABYC User Guide which I think is a very useful post so I hope Mark doesn’t mind me copying it in again

To follow on from John’s email regarding the use of the Fleet field to group the boats for scoring and the Class field as the type of boat, the ABYC user guide has four definitions, which are important to understand. See below.

It is important to understand some basic concepts that are used in Sailwave. If you don’t understand the terminology it is easy to get confused.

Fleet – A group of boats that will sail and be scored together, they can be a one design class, or different boats using a handicap or rating system. Portsmouth, PHRF, or IRC would be a fleet made up of several different classes of boats using a handicap or rating system. Conversely Naples Sabots, or Optimists may be broken up into several different fleets, A’s, B’s, C’s etc.

Class – The type of boat all carrying the same class insignia per Rule G1.1(a). Examples are Farr 40, 49er, Snipe, Cal 20, Naples Sabot, Optimist, etc.

Division – Generally used to further divides fleets. For example, Olympic 470 Men and Women often sail in a combined fleet, and are scored combined, with the division indicating Men and Women.

Flights – A flight is a competitor attribute that can change on a per race basis. It is most commonly used in very large regattas where the fleet size precludes a single mass start. The fleet is divided into flights in accordance with Appendix LE Addendum C qualifying series. Laser Class, Formula 18 Catamaran, International Optimist Class Association (IODA) and International Naples Sabot Association (INSA) events use variations of this method for their large championships.

I know in many instances you can get away by calling them different things but especially when you get to multiple fleets of NHC boats and Aliases you really need to use the Fleets field which is what I’ve done in the modified file attached and then used the division field as what you call the starting class

So your answer to 1) was almost but you need to have a Fleet and I’ve set it to group by fleet after scoring. You have some overides for different fleets although 3 of these have no overrides so they don’t really need to be there - but they are not doing any harm so I will leave that up to you.

I also added the 6th race to allow locations for the carried forward ratings to be stored. If you press F6 then R the display will change to show ratings for each race and you will see the Ratings that need to get carried forward there, in Race 6. The Ratings that are carried forward go into the ratings for Race 1. If the competitor list is the same or similar just copy the file and delete all but the last(empty) race and then add more races this will move all the ratings ready for the next series. So I think this answers your question 3) - No they go into the ratings of Race 1, the competitor rating holds the NHC Base Rating (or in your case whatever system you choose to use as the base rating)

Please check the file over to make sure it is doing what you intended.

Oh and thank you for your comments

Jon

···

On 8 April 2014 12:55, Patrick Blaney patrick.blaney@phblaney.com wrote:

Dear John,

I am intrigued by the complexity and breadth of the questions posed to you on this forum, and now have a far great appreciation of how good (and versatile) a programme Sailwave has become and how much of its capabilities are still not fully appreciated by many of us who try to use it in our own clubs.

I am also amazed by the speed and quality of your responses to all of us who try to make it work for our unique racing and results setup, thank you seems totally inadequate but a lot of what you all do is, I am afraid, somewhat beyond my mathematical and computer skills so I struggle to keep up but enjoy trying and I know that if I persist I will get there.

Now for my turn to ask a few questions of you, and ,hopefully, I will attach the .blw file which shows what I have done in processing results so you can see both my output and what I have done and whether I am doing things correctly or in the most appropriate way.

By way of introduction, I am re-inputting all the 2013 seasons results into Sailwave, using both the handicaps calculated by our 2013 handicap committee, and then using the 2014 RYA NHC handicapping formula. My objective is to run the entire 2013 season this way and then compare the end handicaps/results to see what differences there would have been had we applied NHC and thus, hopefully, prove that using RYA NHC would have produced a better (and more equitable) outcome – or failing that explain why not. I plan to then use the 2013 output as the starting point for the 2014 results, again using the NHC 2014 scoring methodology, and bring things forward from there. I have to get this all done by the end of April 2014 as we have agreed to use existing handicaps until then.

I have started out by re-doing the April 2013 Series Results. Once I have that series set up and sorted out properly then I am going to run the 4 other series which have up to 50% larger fleets, maximum of 50+ boats, using the April Series as template.

In April 2013, we had 2 Classes of Cruisers, Class 1 (12 boats) and Class 2 (10 boats), which start 15 minutes apart but sail the same course. These boats come from 2 different clubs, ISC and GSC.

Not all the boats in our fleet are of types identifiable in the list of handicaps available under RYA NHC, so I start with an immediate disadvantage of being unable to get Base NHC Handicaps for all boats. For this reason, and because these boats have raced for the past five years, and their handicaps do reflect how they have performed in that period, I wanted to start out using the opening ECHO handicaps instead of the NHC RYA Base handicaps. However, I would like to get the best RYA details by boat type – if I can and have a project to visit every boat and see if I can cross reference it with the RYA listings.

For each Class – which I have called a Starting Class (using the Division Column in Sailwave), I simply list boats and handicaps by Class, whether Class 1 or 2.

We give results in each Class and on a Combined Class basis, so I set up an alias for each boat in a Combined Class (also a Starting Class) so that I could produce results for that Combined Class – again using the ECHO handicaps established by the 2013 Handicap Committee. I thus have 3 sets of results, Class 1, Class 2 and Combined Class.

I then set up another alias on a Combined Class basis, this time using NHC as the scoring system, but used the ECHO handicaps as the starting handicaps. I didn’t try to use the ECHO handicaps as the NHC Base Handicaps but because I had populated the ECHO handicaps in the Rating Column before I created the alias, I assume that it just took the ECHO handicaps as populated as the “base” handicaps?

I then put in the finish time by boat and scored each race. This output “proved” the ECHO Sailwave Results against the 2013 Results already calculated, so I knew that Sailwave was working as intended.

The results also were proceeded using the NHC Scoring System, and this, as expected, changed the handicaps after each race in accordance with the standard formulae in the NHC programme, and so produces a slightly different result both by race and in the series. The changes were not very significant – but the principle explanation was that a lot of boats were unable to compete in all of the 5 races in one case because of the wedding of one of our members (on a Saturday during the racing season!) and in the other, the funeral of a friend of many of our sailors.

When I score the series (and I use the Club Mode External) it gives out several error messages, both saying that there is no start for 2 Class 1 boats in any of the 5 races when (in both cases) these 2 boats (Double Jeopardy and Scorpio Jnr) have had finish times input and thus either been scored in a race or been coded as DNC/DNF.

Notwithstanding this error message, both boats are included in the NHC Results and their handicaps are adjusted for the following race – as one would expect.

So, my questions?

1.   Is what I have done correct and if so why do I get the error message?
   

2.   How do I find the handicaps calculated by NHC after Race 5? When I sort the results by race ratings I cannot see the column for the next races rating? I did add an extra race (Race 6), as seems to have been suggested in recent posts, but nothing showed up?
   

3.   Assuming I just copy the April Series as the Pro-Forma for the May Series (adding the 20 or so additional boats required), and deleted the April 2013 individual races, do I simply copy the final NHC Handicaps into the Rating Column and then input the May Race details and score the series as before?
   

[Patrick_Blaney1]

Thank you Jon, and apologies for getting the spelling of your name wrong!

This will take a little while to assimilate, but it looks good thank you.

I note your comments about Fleet, Class and Division and appreciate their importance better now – I have printed out the ABYC Users Guide to help me

I will work away on the May Series as suggested and see how that goes.

Thank you

Patrick

···

From: sailwave@yahoogroups.com [mailto:sailwave@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Jon Eskdale
Sent: 08 April 2014 20:52
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [sailwave] Multiple Class Results using ECHO and NHC 2014 [1 Attachment]

Hi Patrick,

Have a look at the attached file, which solves the problem of the missing starts. The message was correct in that many of the Aliases were not in starts. One thing that does cause some confusion is the use of the word Class

Mark posted last month an extract from ABYC User Guide which I think is a very useful post so I hope Mark doesn’t mind me copying it in again

To follow on from John’s email regarding the use of the Fleet field to group the boats for scoring and the Class field as the type of boat, the ABYC user guide has four definitions, which are important to understand. See below.

It is important to understand some basic concepts that are used in Sailwave. If you don’t understand the terminology it is easy to get confused.

Fleet – A group of boats that will sail and be scored together, they can be a one design class, or different boats using a handicap or rating system. Portsmouth, PHRF, or IRC would be a fleet made up of several different classes of boats using a handicap or rating system. Conversely Naples Sabots, or Optimists may be broken up into several different fleets, A’s, B’s, C’s etc.

Class – The type of boat all carrying the same class insignia per Rule G1.1(a). Examples are Farr 40, 49er, Snipe, Cal 20, Naples Sabot, Optimist, etc.

Division – Generally used to further divides fleets. For example, Olympic 470 Men and Women often sail in a combined fleet, and are scored combined, with the division indicating Men and Women.

Flights – A flight is a competitor attribute that can change on a per race basis. It is most commonly used in very large regattas where the fleet size precludes a single mass start. The fleet is divided into flights in accordance with Appendix LE Addendum C qualifying series. Laser Class, Formula 18 Catamaran, International Optimist Class Association (IODA) and International Naples Sabot Association (INSA) events use variations of this method for their large championships.

I know in many instances you can get away by calling them different things but especially when you get to multiple fleets of NHC boats and Aliases you really need to use the Fleets field which is what I’ve done in the modified file attached and then used the division field as what you call the starting class

So your answer to 1) was almost but you need to have a Fleet and I’ve set it to group by fleet after scoring. You have some overides for different fleets although 3 of these have no overrides so they don’t really need to be there - but they are not doing any harm so I will leave that up to you.

I also added the 6th race to allow locations for the carried forward ratings to be stored. If you press F6 then R the display will change to show ratings for each race and you will see the Ratings that need to get carried forward there, in Race 6. The Ratings that are carried forward go into the ratings for Race 1. If the competitor list is the same or similar just copy the file and delete all but the last(empty) race and then add more races this will move all the ratings ready for the next series. So I think this answers your question 3) - No they go into the ratings of Race 1, the competitor rating holds the NHC Base Rating (or in your case whatever system you choose to use as the base rating)

Please check the file over to make sure it is doing what you intended.

Oh and thank you for your comments

Jon

On 8 April 2014 12:55, Patrick Blaney patrick.blaney@phblaney.com wrote:

Dear John,

I am intrigued by the complexity and breadth of the questions posed to you on this forum, and now have a far great appreciation of how good (and versatile) a programme Sailwave has become and how much of its capabilities are still not fully appreciated by many of us who try to use it in our own clubs.

I am also amazed by the speed and quality of your responses to all of us who try to make it work for our unique racing and results setup, thank you seems totally inadequate but a lot of what you all do is, I am afraid, somewhat beyond my mathematical and computer skills so I struggle to keep up but enjoy trying and I know that if I persist I will get there.

Now for my turn to ask a few questions of you, and ,hopefully, I will attach the .blw file which shows what I have done in processing results so you can see both my output and what I have done and whether I am doing things correctly or in the most appropriate way.

By way of introduction, I am re-inputting all the 2013 seasons results into Sailwave, using both the handicaps calculated by our 2013 handicap committee, and then using the 2014 RYA NHC handicapping formula. My objective is to run the entire 2013 season this way and then compare the end handicaps/results to see what differences there would have been had we applied NHC and thus, hopefully, prove that using RYA NHC would have produced a better (and more equitable) outcome – or failing that explain why not. I plan to then use the 2013 output as the starting point for the 2014 results, again using the NHC 2014 scoring methodology, and bring things forward from there. I have to get this all done by the end of April 2014 as we have agreed to use existing handicaps until then.

I have started out by re-doing the April 2013 Series Results. Once I have that series set up and sorted out properly then I am going to run the 4 other series which have up to 50% larger fleets, maximum of 50+ boats, using the April Series as template.

In April 2013, we had 2 Classes of Cruisers, Class 1 (12 boats) and Class 2 (10 boats), which start 15 minutes apart but sail the same course. These boats come from 2 different clubs, ISC and GSC.

Not all the boats in our fleet are of types identifiable in the list of handicaps available under RYA NHC, so I start with an immediate disadvantage of being unable to get Base NHC Handicaps for all boats. For this reason, and because these boats have raced for the past five years, and their handicaps do reflect how they have performed in that period, I wanted to start out using the opening ECHO handicaps instead of the NHC RYA Base handicaps. However, I would like to get the best RYA details by boat type – if I can and have a project to visit every boat and see if I can cross reference it with the RYA listings.

For each Class – which I have called a Starting Class (using the Division Column in Sailwave), I simply list boats and handicaps by Class, whether Class 1 or 2.

We give results in each Class and on a Combined Class basis, so I set up an alias for each boat in a Combined Class (also a Starting Class) so that I could produce results for that Combined Class – again using the ECHO handicaps established by the 2013 Handicap Committee. I thus have 3 sets of results, Class 1, Class 2 and Combined Class.

I then set up another alias on a Combined Class basis, this time using NHC as the scoring system, but used the ECHO handicaps as the starting handicaps. I didn’t try to use the ECHO handicaps as the NHC Base Handicaps but because I had populated the ECHO handicaps in the Rating Column before I created the alias, I assume that it just took the ECHO handicaps as populated as the “base” handicaps?

I then put in the finish time by boat and scored each race. This output “proved” the ECHO Sailwave Results against the 2013 Results already calculated, so I knew that Sailwave was working as intended.

The results also were proceeded using the NHC Scoring System, and this, as expected, changed the handicaps after each race in accordance with the standard formulae in the NHC programme, and so produces a slightly different result both by race and in the series. The changes were not very significant – but the principle explanation was that a lot of boats were unable to compete in all of the 5 races in one case because of the wedding of one of our members (on a Saturday during the racing season!) and in the other, the funeral of a friend of many of our sailors.

When I score the series (and I use the Club Mode External) it gives out several error messages, both saying that there is no start for 2 Class 1 boats in any of the 5 races when (in both cases) these 2 boats (Double Jeopardy and Scorpio Jnr) have had finish times input and thus either been scored in a race or been coded as DNC/DNF.

Notwithstanding this error message, both boats are included in the NHC Results and their handicaps are adjusted for the following race – as one would expect.

So, my questions?

1.   Is what I have done correct and if so why do I get the error message?
   

2.   How do I find the handicaps calculated by NHC after Race 5? When I sort the results by race ratings I cannot see the column for the next races rating? I did add an extra race (Race 6), as seems to have been suggested in recent posts, but nothing showed up?
   

3.   Assuming I just copy the April Series as the Pro-Forma for the May Series (adding the 20 or so additional boats required), and deleted the April 2013 individual races, do I simply copy the final NHC Handicaps into the Rating Column and then input the May Race details and score the series as before?