yes you have cause you bothered to turn up and race and the 4 boats you raced against might be great saliors.
If someones bothered to turn up that should be rewarded. in chips high point scoring for example small fleets get penalised./
1 factor in high points scoring like chips is that if small fleets turn out is it your fault? no but in these type of system you are penalised for that.
For instance what happens if you race against the best in your club and beat them and you never done that before but it actually works out that this is your worst reult cause of it being a small fleet. nthat deflates you and make you feel disenchanted with sailing.
You should reward people for sailing regardless of the size of fleet.
take a very windy day and say only 4 boats in a class go out. does it show skill for them to race in this challanging conditions. yes it does. but under chips it doesnt, int puts the skill down to large fleets not weather conditions.
At the end of the day your season can hinder on wether enough boats race in the races you race. in certain situation someone can win all races required to complete a series. say 9 races for example but still end up 4 or 6th overall due to the number of people racing.
As i said before if this was used to choose our olympic racers we would not of had ben anslie sailing for us and that in a fact we would not have won gold in the fin or even had him sail a lazer one previous olympics. That speaks volumns for the failure of high points scoring to take into account wind conditions and people determination to sail in challanging conditions.
you seem to think that sailing in large flets is more important than having skill.
Should a race series be decided on who turns up to race or by skill it self.
take a look at this as well
On your first point, the points for 1st are tending to 100.0 for a very high number of competitors
The gap between 2 subsequent boats is the same for a given number of starters (except for ronding to 1 decimal: for 25, the gap is always 3.7 or 3.8), so it's just impossible to have higher point for 2nd than for 1st in the same race, and same points are posible, but for an extremely high number of competitors.
But indeed, 1st out of 8 or less receives less points than 2nd out of 25.
You can also accept that it could be much more difficult to be 2nd or even out of 25 than 1st out of 3 or 4...
What is for me unfair in Chips is that a DNF out of 3 receives more points than 14th out of 25...
Comparison with Olympic results is no good method.
If you give a scale 0 to 10 for the skill of competitors (10 being according to ISAF standard, World's top 30), all Olympic athletes rank 10 or 9. Gaps in skills are almost equally spread.
In a World Championsip Laser Radial Women, 10 to 7
National regatta, 8 to 2
Club regatta, 7 to 0. There is probably a larger gap in skill between the 1st and 2nd in a local regatta than between the last two, both being probably 'deep" 0's, and even that difference of gaps is not considered in Chips.
In Europe, we are using commonly the "Austrian" high point system (as name doen't tell, used il all countries except Austria). Points=101+1000*log(s/p). DNC scored 0, last boat always 101 if all boats finised, DNF scored as number of starters, 101 (more realistic than Chips), points for the first place growing with the number of starters.
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Any system used for club racing seems unfair but this is only true as the final results calculated on a small number of races, in some of our local championships, the number of races is "just" 3 races every sunday, May 1st to October 31st (78 races, not all sailed), and the results are fair, and looking at 5 consecutive years, this sow a clear progress of some crews, decline of others, but certainly no unfair rankings.
With Chips, at 1st impression, only the points for the last boats are over-evaluated for low number of competitors.
Imagine a championship with 5 - 5 - 5 - 25 competitors, with boat A finiship DNF - DNF - DNF - DNF (160.4) and boat B DNC - DNC - DNC - 1 (99.7)... that's wrong ...
Phil