[sailwave] Personal Handicaps

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1 
Hi Ken and Sailwave users,

        I am about to start trialing SailWave at Brisbane 18 Footers. In our junior and beginner adult group we have a lot of people who move around the fleet of club owned boats. At the beginning of the season, I proposed to run a personal handicap series with every individual sailor having their own handicap and pointscore. The idea was to encourage people to sail more often.  However the book keeping was impossible.

If your personal handicap thing is along the same lines, I imagine all we have to do is set up a separate "Fleet" pointscore entering a person's name instead of a Boat Name and then add in some sort of arbitrary handicap. I am so new to sailwave I haven't even found where to do that yet. What does the rest of the world think?

Regards,

              Mark Jones.
2

Thank you Mark.

I have been using Sailwave since October and have found it to be fantastic.

The reason for wanting to introduce personal handicaps is that in rebuilding the racing at our club the skill levels and classes vary considerably, from dinghies to trailer sailers, from teenagers to retired, and I need to make sure we encourage all levels.

Hopefully someone may be able to come up with some guidance for us both.

Keep in touch.

Kind regards

···

----- Original Message -----

From:
markcoorparoo@aol.com

To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:49 AM

Subject: Re: [sailwave] Personal Handicaps

  Hi Ken and Sailwave users,

          I am about to start trialing SailWave at Brisbane 18 Footers. In our junior and beginner adult group we have a lot of people who move around the fleet of club owned boats. At the beginning of the season, I proposed to run a personal handicap series with every individual sailor having their own handicap and pointscore. The idea was to encourage people to sail more often.  However the book keeping was impossible.

  If your personal handicap thing is along the same lines, I imagine all we have to do is set up a separate "Fleet" pointscore entering a person's name instead of a Boat Name and then add in some sort of arbitrary handicap. I am so new to sailwave I haven't even found where to do that yet. What does the rest of the world think?

  Regards,
                Mark Jones.
3

Hi Mark

From the sound of it, your PH series is just on its own, not run in
parallel with any other series, and you are all in the same type of
boat? That is, helmsman A will just have one PH, not different PH’s
for different classes? In which case it’s very simple to both enter
race results (edit the appropriate cell in the main spreadsheet view
once the competitor has been entered with the appropriate handicap) and
score using whatever points system you define under ‘Scoring Systems’.
Changing PH after each race can be done manually, or you can define an
expression under ‘Tools’ - but note ‘work in progress’: not tried this
yet :wink:

If it’s more complicated than this, let us know!

wrote:

··· 
Mike Croker
Lancing SC

markcoorparoo@aol.com

Hi Ken and Sailwave users,



        I am about to start trialing SailWave at Brisbane 18

Footers. In our junior and beginner adult group we have a lot of people
who move around the fleet of club owned boats. At the beginning of the
season, I proposed to run a personal handicap series with every
individual sailor having their own handicap and pointscore. The idea
was to encourage people to sail more often. However the book keeping
was impossible.

If your personal handicap thing is along the same lines, I imagine

all we have to do is set up a separate “Fleet” pointscore entering a
person’s name instead of a Boat Name and then add in some sort of
arbitrary handicap. I am so new to sailwave I haven’t even found where
to do that yet. What does the rest of the world think?

Regards,

              Mark Jones.
4

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your comments.

What I have is a mixed fleet ranging from small dinghies to fast trailer sailers (Elliott 770).

Each skipper remains in the same boat for the entire series so I guess you could say the personal handicap refers to the skipper/boat combination for the series.

What I need is some guidance as to a formula I could use to arrive at a handicap based on past performance in the series so far.

Any ideas?

Kind regards

···

----- Original Message -----

From:
Mike Croker

To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 8:33 PM

Subject: Re: [sailwave] Personal Handicaps

Hi Mark
From the sound of it, your PH series is just on its own, not run in parallel with any other series, and you are all in the same type of boat? That is, helmsman A will just have one PH, not different PH’s for different classes? In which case it’s very simple to both enter race results (edit the appropriate cell in the main spreadsheet view once the competitor has been entered with the appropriate handicap) and score using whatever points system you define under ‘Scoring Systems’. Changing PH after each race can be done manually, or you can define an expression under ‘Tools’ - but note ‘work in progress’: not tried this yet :wink:
If it’s more complicated than this, let us know!

Mike Croker
Lancing SC

markcoorparoo@aol.com wrote:

    Hi Ken and Sailwave users,

            I am about to start trialing SailWave at Brisbane 18 Footers. In our junior and beginner adult group we have a lot of people who move around the fleet of club owned boats. At the beginning of the season, I proposed to run a personal handicap series with every individual sailor having their own handicap and pointscore. The idea was to encourage people to sail more often.  However the book keeping was impossible.

    If your personal handicap thing is along the same lines, I imagine all we have to do is set up a separate "Fleet" pointscore entering a person's name instead of a Boat Name and then add in some sort of arbitrary handicap. I am so new to sailwave I haven't even found where to do that yet. What does the rest of the world think?

    Regards,
                  Mark Jones.
5

This idea may have been made obsolete by some of the latest versions of Sailwave (1’m on 1.57 and no time to deal with a new version).

But you can switch “Personal Handicaps” in and out by having two sets of Ratings files;-

I have one called “PersonalHandicaps.csv” in which I sail an RS300KW which has a handicap of 1050 (giving me a 5% boost), and Another file called “NormalHandicaps.csv” in which the RS300KW has the Normal Handicap of 1000.

This allows me to quickly score any race twice - once with Normal Handicaps and Once with Personal Handicaps.

I get Round any Publish problems by using the BoatName Field to hold the actual Class names.

Its a pain to enter the Personal Handicap numbers for the entire clubs racing membership, but very easy to update an use afterwards. The measure of how good the PH numbers are is shown up when you score a series and see a very small spread of final scores between the entire fleet of qualifiers.

Kevin W.

···

From: “Ken Durward” kendurward@internode.on.net
Reply-To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [sailwave] Personal Handicaps
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:38:13 +0930

Thank you Mark.

I have been using Sailwave since October and have found it to be fantastic.

The reason for wanting to introduce personal handicaps is that in rebuilding the racing at our club the skill levels and classes vary considerably, from dinghies to trailer sailers, from teenagers to retired, and I need to make sure we encourage all levels.

Hopefully someone may be able to come up with some guidance for us both.

Keep in touch.

Kind regards

----- Original Message -----

From: markcoorparoo@aol.com

To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:49 AM

Subject: Re: [sailwave] Personal Handicaps

Hi Ken and Sailwave users,

        I am about to start trialing SailWave at Brisbane 18 Footers. In our junior and beginner adult group we have a lot of people who move around the fleet of club owned boats. At the beginning of the season, I proposed to run a personal handicap series with every individual sailor having their own handicap and pointscore. The idea was to encourage people to sail more often.  However the book keeping was impossible.

If your personal handicap thing is along the same lines, I imagine all we have to do is set up a separate "Fleet" pointscore entering a person's name instead of a Boat Name and then add in some sort of arbitrary handicap. I am so new to sailwave I haven't even found where to do that yet. What does the rest of the world think?

Regards,
              Mark Jones.

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6

Ken

Lots have been tried ;), for example:

  1. Adjust each all PH’s after each race so that every entry’s
    elapsed time would have been the same as the mid-fleet boat (using the
    PH for that race), but using a damping factor to reduce big swings (e.g
    only apply 1/3 of the calculated correction).
  2. As above, but include past races, maybe with an exponential
    weighting factor…
  3. Etc., etc…
    IMHO one reason that there isn’t any computation hard-wired into
    Sailwave is that everyone uses something slightly different, and Colin
    probably has enough on his plate with all this Flights and App’Q’
    nonsense…

My personal preference (as Handicapper at Lancing SC) is to use last
year’s PH handicaps (no-one gets better than 1.25 x PY, currently the
fastest are about 0.9xPY), tweaked against whoever did well last year,
and chart the BCE values normalised to the mid-fleet boat (easy to get
the BCE’s into MSExcel). I’ll then monitor the extremes of the graph
(most competitors will lie within a +/- 5% band) and make manual
adjustments as required every few races - sometimes a competitor gets
very lucky / very wet, which is obvious :slight_smile:

Not exactly transparent (“trust me, I’m a Handicapper”, but I have been
know to publish the graphs), but one problem with the auto adjustment
idea is just where you start from (e.g. does everyone start at PY -
gives an immediate advantage to the better sailors, or from your best
guess - ah, bit of bias there, then…). I also look at the pecking
order within fleets to make sure that the PH’s reflect this. The
biggest problem is ironing out the sort of variations that occur with
wind strength e.g. light winds = RS400 or Laser 4000 wins, Contender
and Laser>> get stuffed, and vice versa.

Oh, and we use average lap time racing, which does help iron out some
of the time dependent wind variation effects (our main PH series is in
the evenings, so we frequently get a veering and dying sea breeze).

Good luck!

Ken Durward wrote:

··· 
Mike Croker
Lancing SC

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your comments.

What I have is a mixed fleet ranging
from small dinghies to fast trailer sailers (Elliott 770).

Each skipper remains in the same
boat for the entire series so I guess you could say the personal
handicap refers to the skipper/boat combination for the series.

What I need is some guidance as to a
formula I could use to arrive at a handicap based on past performance
in the series so far.

Any ideas?

7

Hi Mike,

IMHO one reason that there isn't any computation hard-wired into Sailwave

is that everyone uses something slightly different, and Colin probably has
enough on his plate with all this Flights and App'Q' nonsense.....<<

Exactly right... hence the expression route - more vars can be addded as
necessary. I tend to agree about 'Add Q' - IMHO the way to make fleet
racing more attractive to the media and general public is to replace it with
team or match racing...

Regards,
Colin
www.sailwave.com

···

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