Personal Handicaps - How Do You Work Them Out

Originally posted by JohnJack This is quite interesting, does this make the winner a bit of a complete random, as you suggested maybe it was more the improvers who end up winning and not the technically someone who has had a really good sail?

We dual score our personal handicap series, so one set of results is with standard handicaps and the hotshot who did best on the day wins, the other is with personal handicaps and the improver who did best on the day wins.

The way my club works out our historic numbers, BTW is that I set Sailwave to display results as corrected times and export as CSV. The CSV export goes into a spreadsheet which calculates every result as a percentage of the winning boats time.
The spreadsheet then spits out an average % for every competitor. Those with an average of 100-105% sail off standard handicapand are called Band 0. Those who average 105-110% get 5% added to PY number and are band 1, and so on to band 5.

You have to start by figuring out what you want your personal handicaps to do. Its a term that covers a big variety of different approaches.

At my club we work out the handicaps at the beginning of the year based on past season's results and dual score the series. This makes it an improvers trophy, and because its very difficult to improve on being 1st, the best sailors in the club are rarely in contention.

Other clubs keep the handicaps smack up to date with latest performances, which IMHO makes the series win a bit random, but means the race wins go to the people who put in an out of the skin performance on the day, so its very good for spot prizes - best sailor on the day.

Still another option is to keep it as a best sailor wins series, but use personal handicaps to make the racing much closer, so things are much tighter. I think there are a number of clubs using NHC, originally intended for cruisers, for this.

One club uses personal handicaps for a very popular evening pursuit series, and sets their handicaps so its still best sailor wins, but the fleet finishes in much tighter bunch and everyone gets a hot dinner and eats and socialises together.

All of these - and a considerable number of others - are perfectly reasonable approaches, but they are all different, so it really is important to figure out which one you want to do. If half the club is thinking its one approach and half another then half are going to be upset about the result...

Edited by JimC - 10 May 17 at 7:18pm

I think we do +0.5% for every race win and -2.5 for every completed series without a race win.  It's not perfect as it tends to boost handicaps to high levels if people don't complete series, but seems to work ok when people are regularly completing series.