Tie breaks using RRS A8.2 with Flights

[bscsailing]

Hi,

I am doing a bit of testing ahead of the 100-boat Streaker Nationals where we will be using flights for the first time in our history!

We intend to use the amended A8.2 and I have checked the option “8.2 only applies for boats in the same start”. However, in my simple 8-boat test scenario (2 boats in each flight, 4 boats in each start) the ties are not being broken correctly.

I have provided a link to my test file below.

The flights/starts for the 3 races are as follows:
Race 1st Start 2nd Start
Q1 Yellow & Blue Red & Green
Q2 Yellow & Red Blue & Green
Q3 Blue & Red Yellow & Green

There are two ties not broken correctly:
Tom and Martin in Q1 - this is the only race where they met and Tom won.
Alan and Giles in Q1 - this is the only race where they met and Alan won.

What am I missing please?!

Sailwave file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V4y-BJVsxKpWN7oKeELdneEjCmCHFK4N/view?usp=sharing

[huw]

Hi Neil,

Welcome back to the SUG forum.

What are you missing?
You are not understanding the difference between who is starting together (colour flight/group pairs) and flight colour, which I prefer to call colour group in this way of doing ‘flights’.

Yes, Tom & Martin race against each other in Q1 but they are in different colour groups. Same with Alan & Giles.

The check box you have ticked option “8.2 only applies for boats in the same start” on the Race tab of Scoring system applies to competitors in the same flight / colour group not race start colour group pairings.

Sailwave has scored Tom & Martin correctly but not Alan & Giles with the settings you have enabled. Un-ticking option “8.2 only applies for boats in the same start” on Race tab of Scoring system, scores Alan & Giles correctly.

I hope my explanation makes sense.
Kind regards,
Huw

[bscsailing]

Thanks Huw. I’m still struggling with this, sorry!

Note: the .blw on the link in the original post is live and has been updated as described below…

I have noticed that (outside of sailwave at least) the term ‘flight’ is used interchangeably to mean ‘boats that start together’ and/or ‘boats in the same colour group’.
As you say, in my example, I have setup each helm in a colour group which I have put in the ‘Flight’ field. Then, for each race, I have defined two starts, each start with a different pair of colours…
that’s just to make sure we’re on the same page so far.

OK, so you state that, although the tick box says “8.2 only applies to boats in the same start” that is not what it is doing? That is definitely what we want it to do! The only race where Tom and Martin are in the same start is Q1, therefore that is the race that should be used to break the tie (in Tom’s favour).

Nevertheless, to test your suggestion, I un-ticked the option “8.2 only applies…” and rescored. That gave the appearance that the problem was fixed but I realised that my test case wasn’t a true test! Standard A8.2 (without flights) would have broken the tie in the same way (because Q1 happened to be the only race where Tom and Martin were not tied).

For a more thorough test, I have changed the result of Q3 so that Tom was 2nd and Martin was 1st (but in a different start). So now I have a test scenario that is not scoring correctly, whether I tick the “8.2 only applies…” option or not.

If the tie is broken using standard A8.2 (as if without flights) it breaks in favour of Martin (the winner of the ‘last race’ Q3). But that is not correct, because Tom and Martin weren’t in the same start in Q3. What we want, as the check box says, is to break the tie by only applying 8.2 when the boats were in the same start… in this case Q1. That would break the tie in favour of Tom.

I don’t think this method of using pairs of colour groups in a single start is unusual. We have modelled our SIs on some standard Topper and ILCA events that I know were scored using sailwave. That said, I don’t know how they setup sailwave and I haven’t double checked to see if all their ties are broken correctly!!

Hope you can help!
Thanks,
Neil

[bscsailing]

Just in case my sailwave version is doing something different to yours, this is what I see…

[huw]

Hi Neil,

I completely understand how you have set-up your file. As you say it is a quite common set-up. Personally I do not use the flights column but another Sailwave column and label it ‘Colour Group’. But that is me, because I try to distinguish between flights, which usually are reassigned on a daily basis, and colour group assignment. I agree outside of Sailwave ‘flight’ is used to cover both colour group assignment and initial flight assignment and then daily flight reassignment.

I agree Tom & Martin sail against one another in Q1 BUT they are not in the same individual colour group, they are in the same colour group pairing. This an important distinction. Tom and Martin are never, with the way you have things, in the same individual colour group.

I also agree using colour group pairing is not unusual but what is unusual, to me, is the requirement to tie break on who sailed in what pairing of colour groups, e.g. yellow & blue.

Sailwave cannot score the tie break in the way you are wanting with the set-up you have. It has never been a problem for the Topper & ILCA classes that I am aware of. They just accept the way Sailwave does the tie break.

There might be away to achieve the tie break you are looking for but it will be a different and more complicated set-up. I am not promising it can be done until I have had a look my idea in detail. My idea involves using what I call true flights not your set-up of round robin colour group pairing.

I need to test my idea out and see if would achieve the tie break you are looking for. I am busy tomorrow but should be able to test my idea on Monday.

Kind regards,
Huw

[huw]

Hi Neil,

It was quicker to do than I thought, so no waiting until Monday to see if this does what you want in terms of tie break.

Take a look at this Sailwave .BLW file.
Neil Flights Testing - Huw.blw (26.9 KB)

Kind regards,
Huw

[bscsailing]

Sorry Huw, your test file is not helping me. Are you one of the developers representing sailwave.com when you say that the “8.2 only applies…” check box is working as it should? It’s looking increasingly like a bug to me.

I can’t believe the ILCA and Topper classes, who regularly use this “round robin colour group pairing” (as you call it) would find it acceptable that ties are not broken in accordance with their Sailing Instructions for the event. I suppose it is plausible that they haven’t noticed (especially if it’s a recent bug) but that’s not a reason for the bug not to be fixed.

Is there a way to break ties manually in sailwave i.e. to override the rank of a given boat after a sailwave rescore?

Neil

[huw]

Hi Neil,

I do liaise and talk with the developer very frequently but I am not the developer. I provide support to the best of my ability and I wrote the User Guide, which I am in the process of revamping and expanding. I have used Sailwave for many, many events of different kinds, including round robin colour groups, since I started using it when it was first released back in 2001.

Is there a way to break ties manually in sailwave i.e. to override the rank of a given boat after a sailwave rescore?

Short answer yes. Just edit the rank positions in the rank column to what you want then click column header to sort before publishing. This process will have to be done every time the results are scored / re-scored.

If you are sure the competitors are ranked in the order that is required then you could also use ‘Tools | Seed competitor field’.

The flights facility in Sailwave was included not for use with round robin colour groups which were used in Sailwave before flights functionality was included. World Sailing introduced flights for large regattas where the entry numbers are large, to ease race management in reducing the number of competitors in each start to typically 50. So to the best of my knowledge, there has never been in Sailwave the tie-break procedure you are wanting when scoring round robin colour groups.

As I said previously there is an important difference between two colour group competitors sailing against each other in a race and them being in the same colour flight. This is why my solution does tie-break in the way you want, but what is not happening is that the Rank column is being numbered to take into account broken ties. I will talk to the developer but I do not expect they will be able to take a good look at the issue for 8 weeks or so; they are travelling between events in Europe doing scoring.

The screen capture is from my modified Sailwave where I have put the colour groups Neil assigned in a different column and configured flights Purple & White (to save confusion with the colour group colours) as starts in each race to have the appropriate colour group pairs:
R1 S1 Blue & Yellow S2 Green & Red
R2 S1 Yellow & Red S2 Blue & Green
R3 S1 Blue & Red S2 Yellow & Green
Note - The flight column is showing the flights for R3 the last race I set-up. The flight a competitor was in is shown in the individual race columns.

In your original you have used flights for colour groups but configured to use the same flight for all races for competitor. So Sailwave sees that in R1 Martin (Blue) & Tom (Yellow) are in different flights so does not apply the tie break you want. The same for Alan (Green) & Giles (Red) in R1.

Please could you provide examples of ILCA & Topper, or any other class, NoR/SIs that have written into them a difference to RRS Appendix A ‘A8 Tie Break procedure’? In particular wording that is describing the tie break procedure you are wanting.

Have the class considered using flights as they are intended to be used?

Kind regards,
Huw

[bscsailing]

OK Huw, I will persist!

It would be reassuring to know that Jon is party to this discussion and believes that the check box for “8.2 only applies…” is ever working correctly.

I am not seeing this in your example because, as you say, the ranks are still equal (whereas, for standard racing without flights, A8.1 and A8.2 are resolved correctly, including the corrected rank).

From the developers perspective, I can’t see why our two setups are that different, unless the code is written such that the check box really means:

“8.2 only applies for boats where the ‘Flights’ field has the same value (regardless of the race starts setup)”.

That would be an oversight (I say bug!) and is not the same as the check box description (or what my SIs say)!

The software would behave correctly (for both our setups) if it tested whether the competitors are in the same START. This is a know fact based on the start settings:

Mine:

or yours:

These setting are honoured correctly when using the Sail num wizard - sailwave knows which start (colour-pair in my case) the boat is in and automatically scores the boat in the correct place for their start (colour-pair)…

…so it shouldn’t be difficult to use the same logic to determine the last race in which the boats were in the same start (rather than the last race where ‘Flight’ had the same value) in order to resolve the tie break correctly.

Here are the SIs for the 2024 Topper Nationals at WPNSA…

https://gbrtopper.ourclubadmin.com/fetchEventDoc.php?e=1313&eventdocument=4062
20.10 RRS A8.2 is changed by appending the words “in which they sailed against each other (pairwise)” to the end of the first sentence and after the words “next-to-last race” in the second sentence.

We have the same text in our SIs.

Thanks,
Neil

[huw]

Hi Neil,

I now understand your position and thinking. Apologies for not doing so earlier.

Thank you for the link to the 2024 Topper Nationals SI’s, I was not aware of the wording you highlighted. It is possible that their results are incorrect.

Jon will I am sure read this thread at some point, but he is out in Garda setting up an electronic tally system and results file for the 29er European Championship, then quickly, after 29er event finishes, moves to South of France to do same for RS Feva World Championship. Then back to Pwllheli to same for Techno Worlds.

To be fair to Jon, to best of my knowledge Jon did not implement flight functionality and has not made any changes to it.

“8.2 only applies for boats where the ‘Flights’ field has the same value (regardless of the race starts setup)”.

That would be an oversight (I say bug!) and is not the same as the check box description (or what my SIs say)!

I would say oversight in wording of check box description when originally coded as the developer at that time was focused on implementing flight functionality not round robin colour group.

There is a solution for the very specific circumstances in your original file but won’t work as a general case solution.

Kind regards,
Huw

[bscsailing]

Thanks Huw - I’m glad we got there in the end!

Incidentally, your proposed purple/white solution is not reliable. As your screenshot shows, there is also a tie for 3rd place between Richard and Steve. They also only met in race Q1 and Steve beat Richard, so the tie should be resolved in Steve’s favour.

So, even if the check box is designed to work as you say (based on the ‘Flight’ column rather than the boats’ start), there is a bug! Hopefully, when Jon has a chance to fix it, he will be able to make it work for both our test cases.

The Streaker Nationals are 11-13 July, so I accept that this issue will not be fixed before then.

I also accept that if we get a decent number of races, the chances of a tie not being broken by A8.1 are slim. Also, as soon as we have had at least one Finals race, that will break any ties reliably using standard A8.2.

That said, my test scenario does represent a realistic scoreline for the minimum number of races that our SIs state can constitute a championship, i.e. if we have dreadful weather and only get 3 races in over 3 days.

If this does happen, I will manually check for any incorrectly resolved ties and, if necessary, override the rank (which I didn’t realise was possible).

I look forward to hearing that Jon has this issue in hand… when he gets a chance.

Thanks,
Neil