Rise Of The Ok etc

I thought the GL handicaps were biased towards the front end of the fleet, whereas the RYA is much more of an average. I used to be more supportive of the RYA approach, but now as a sailing secretary for a club, I'm starting to prefer the GL approach as being more likely to reflect boat performance rather than crew performance. Crew factor will still feature, but less so.

The trouble with expecting clubs to indivually amend the RYA 'starting point' PY number is that if you have only one or two of a class it becomes a personal handicap, and if you have 5 or more they probably race as a fleet and don't get times recorded.

The fact that the big lakes have clubbed together to get round this is terrific and I don't know why the sea clubs and puddle clubs don't do likewise. Or, indeed, as the RYA have the data, why the RYA don't do that.

rb_stretch
The basic algorithm is the same with the exception of the exclusions of "poor performers".  The GL scheme uses (or at least it did the last time I looked) the original PY scheme of standard corrected time + 5% exclusion limit.  The PYS uses an approach based on the standard deviation of the distribution - this is a bit more responsive to the actual distribution than the old PY scheme.  The exclusion limits for the PYS scheme have been tweaked a few times and are very slightly more lenient on poor performance than the GL scheme.  A couple of years ago I did a fairly major comparison of the old PY (GL) and new PYS scheme and found generally very small differences between the two - a few exceptions were classes whose returns were based on very few clubs.

The main differences that I see in the GL scheme are:
(1) They are taking results from one type of sailing water (open water, smallish waves)
(2) They proactively deal with very wind dependent classes by looking at specific data in their preferred conditions.

. . . and absolutely nothing wrong with that . . . and absolutely nothing that couldn't be copied by a Great oceans group (open water, biggish waves, tides) or a Small Puddles group (restricted water, short legs, no waves/tide).  It would be really useful for this to happen and then be able to get a picture of class performance across different conditions.

Mark 

Originally posted by iiitick Boring, boring, boring........why not just give up real sailing and make a computer game out of it.

Horse's for courses. In my case I don't mind wet if I have too. I sail all year round, in all weathers. What I don't like is having to launch the boat and then wade waist deep in water in mid winter before I start racing.
Perhaps that's why I like clubs with pontoons and jettys
I understand that sounds very wimpy to a lot of people on this forum.