After another drubbing by the handicap bandits the other day the subject of personal handicaps was brought up, suprisingly by the chief bandit.

There do seem to be a few clubs that run personal handicap series, does anyone have any knowledge of  how the handicaps tend to be set, and are modified, as we felt that it would be a good experiment for one of our series.

Cheers

Andy

At Wilsonian we use personal handicaps for pursuit races, because they can make the racing and finishes much tighter than they would otherwise be (once you're passed by a faster boat in a pursuit, you can see all too clearly that you're not going to win).

The handicaps were initially guessed at by looking at the finishing order of boats in normal series, and allotting personal corrections accordingly, assuming there is a 10% difference between the fastest and slowest sailor; with hindsight, I'd make that 20% difference, incredible as it sounds. Thereafter, the results of pursuit races are fed back into the system to tweak the personal handicaps by rough and ready rule of thumb/calculation.

We don't use personal handicaps for normal massed start racing because they don't make the racing any better on the water, and lead to a set of results that everyone regards as even more arbitrary than the official PY's. There's not much incentive to improve if the only consequence will be a stiffer handicap, and people might sandbag prior to important events, making the whole thing a pantomime.

The real answer is for slow sailors to learn and improve if they want to win, but in practice few bother to even get a book out of the library...

Two completly different sports and impossible to compair, each class of dinghy is completely different, where as in golf there limition in kit is much smaller, secondly there are thousands of golf handicap bandits out there, i wouldnt want to encourage this in sailing.

The plan was to use all the handicap results as the basis for the personal number, this should iron out the non triers. Do clubs vary the numbers on a race to race basis, or just at the start of the series?

The other option was to award two prizes for the same series, hence giving potentially different winners.

The trouble being that the local conditions do give a couple of classes a big advantage, as on our sheltered small lake light boats with large sail areas have a distinct speed benefit which is not reflected in their PY.

One of the comments was that a well working personal handicap system would give a better idea of the base handicaps that individual classes should have locally.

Andy

when we lived in aus the approach to this was really simple.

races lasted approx 90 mins to an hour.

it was one design racing

handicaps ranged from 0 mins (adjust your elapsed time by 0) to 20 mins (adjust by 20 mins)

after each weekend the handicap result was calculated.

winner had 3 mins deducted, 2nd had 2 mins deducted, 3rd had 1 minute deducted.  if the scratch boat won then everyone was given 3 minutes.

it was an excellent way of sharing out the prizes and was a real challenge for the leading boats to see how far they could win by.

should be done here.

That makes sense for class racing, where the true situaton is all too evident from positions on the water.

But for handicap racing, I wonder if it isn't adjusted PY's for classes that would suit you, Andymck. With many fewer changes involved, it would be a lot simpler to administer, eg. using Giraffe's system for classes instead of individuals.

The issue for classes is that an adjustment of over 30 points is not going to make a difference, (this is known not to be a skill issue) apart from annoying some members of the problem fleets who are the mid level sailors. These guys have spent a lot of money to get an appropriate boat for themselves and the water, and the differential even within the class has been caculated at over 60 points on the PY scale. Most of these guys came in the top half of their nationals fleet last year.

So where some of the fleet are happy to accept a 30 point change, this in fact will make no difference. We are not intending to change all of the handicap racing to personal handicap, as we are aware of the difficulties as mentioned above.

What we are trying to do is make some of the handicap racing more competative for everyone, and therefore boost attendances, as there is a sometimes a general why bother feeling when it comes to the handicap series.

The suggestion of personal handicapping has come from some members of that fleet, as they also see the problem.

What w want to know, before we put a suggestion forward to our racing committee, is how this is run elsewhere, as the idea is to give everyone a chance to win, including the Phantoms.

And  they are one of the many reasons I don't play golf. I've raced under personal handicaps and it seemed a supremely pointless exercise. Isn't the idea that the best sailors win? As for boosting attendances - well it won't boost mine.

If you want to give more people the chance to win have gold and silver fleets etc.  Much easier to administer and still encourages effort.

We have thought of all of these, and they are not applicable to our situation. Does anyone who has raced under them actually want to answer the question about how they were administered?

Hi,

We run a personal handicap series at our club once a year and it's proved quite popular.  We take the results for each race in the Spring series and work out what handicap each boat would have needed to equal the winner's time, assuming the winner sailed on his RYA handicap.  We do this for each race sailed then take the average of the adjustements for each boat to give a new handicap based on the average performance.  We then use these for the Autumn series.  The intersting thing is that we need to make adjustements of over 200 for most people and over 300 for some people, makes you wonder about those who want their handicap changed by 5 points!

We have a personal handicap series run over the whole season. I think worked out thus:-  All individuals times are totalled from the previous season and compared against the best club sailor or sailors who have a zero handicap. The differences are expressed as a percentage. That percentage is then added to their boat PY. New sailors PPY's have to be guessed for their first couple of races and adjusted. Range of difference 0% to 20%.  The "Paddlers Pot" is keenly fought for and well attended. Youngsters in Toppers are first and second so far this year. Can my ego handle it .

Andy

If you want to know how to run a personal handicap system then contact the RYA, there's a very good presentation they have that shows you how to do the calculations. I think there are instructions in YR1 or whatever its now called.

Sometimes - without naming names - a club will simply alter the boats' PYs to try to 'equalise' the individuals' results. Little appreciation of 'statistical significance', and seemingly unable to grasp that someone often wins because, well, because they're actually rather good (like multiple European champion level).

Personally, assuming there's a clean way of determining it, I would instead favour a parallel prize-awarding for 'most improved'. It keeps the purity of "the best" but still encourages everyone else. To most of us, a good result isn't necessarily "1st"; its "not being beaten this time by someone who beat you last time" - otherwise 95% of us wouldn't bother...

As a club you can change the PY's as you (the club) see fit.

Thanks for all the help, the background to the decision to explore how to implement a personal handicap are as follows.

 We are aware that we can change the handicap of the problem fleet, and we are working on a change that is acceptable to the whole of the class. The problem being, as outlined above, that we know from open and national results that the general standard in that fleet is pretty good, but there is still a potential spread of 60 points between the boats. This means that a class correction will either still not make the series competative (we do have several current and past national champs in other fleets) for the leading phantom, or make it impossible for the other members of the fleet to be competative.

The data from our club suggests that a competative phantom with a 80-85kg helm should be sailing off about 950 on our water, using a well sailed laser as the bench mark, once you put a more normal sized phantom helm in the boat you are looking at 1020-1030, obviously on more open water or larger courses the situation changes considerably, due to the weight needed to drive a phantom once up to speed.

With such a wide diversity of performance, although all good yachters in their conditions, which is a much bigger spread than all the other fleets in the dinghy park. In order to maintain dinghy park harmony,a degree of personal handicapping seems the best way forward, and could be applied to the scratch series as well. This would potentially be awarded as a seperate prize for the same series, very much along the ozzy model, but gives more than the three or four phantoms a chance, and therefore hopefully increase turnouts, which due partly to demoralisation has seen a drop in the "all in" series.

We dont want to replace PY handicaping at our club, so the main series would still be done on that basis, but do hope to increase the appeal accross the board, and at the moment we are still in the discussion phase, hence the need to find out how it is done elsewhere.

Have a look at this page.

http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap.html - http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap.html

Stone SC have the Phantom on 994.

Linky no worky !

Try http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap_page.html - http://www.stonesc.co.uk/SSC_handicap_page.html

Crikey, I would like that L2 handicap please. Think a few members would walk out of the club though.....Forgive my relative inexperience but How do they arrive at those figures??

The commitee at hunts are looking at the handicap issues, and this is one of the options being looked at. I was just asked to put forward a suggestion of how a personal handicap system might be implemented, which has now been done, if it gets tried, and seems to work in the long term, I will let you all know what we did, still al very much in the discussion stage.

Andy

Does anyone remember the Ostrabogylus scoring system?  Think that Bryan Willis came up with it originally....or maybe he just introduced it to me.

That was a great way of running a series, and rewarding both consistency and improvement through a series (you can't run a single race on it though).

All less serious than straightforward PY's, and certainly inclusive to the whole fleet for the series.

If I remember correctly, finishing positions are calculated on the standard PY for each race.  However the series results are based on the "points" that you score.

Points awarded for the following reasons:

1 - starting a race

1 - finishing a race

1 - for beating a boat that is in front of you on the overall standings (or within 3 points behind you)

1 - for winning a race on the water

Think this is right, but can't remember - anyone got a better memory than me? 

Chas

why reward bad sailing?

Best improver and points for turning up, racing regularily etc are nice things as an alternative, but all the effort and hot air of personal handicap schemes  could be better put into encouraging one design racing and giving people real advice on how to get better.

Probably one of the differences between dinghies and yachts is you are more likely to get a ride on a good yacht while it's being sailed to perfection than a dinghy of course, but videos and lectures from sail makers etc are all a better use of human energy than personal handicaps.

best left to golfers and other forms of brain-stem death

 ( I have had the annoyance of seeing poorly sailed keel boats 'becoming competitive' under two systems while good teams don't bother- also virtual 'personal' handicaps on schemes like CYCA for one-offs/otherwise dog-boats doing the sport no favours)

The value of using personal handicaps depends upon the culture you have within your club.  IF the good sailors are prepared to get involved and help newbies then racing will thrive and every one is a winner - bigger turnouts, new members improve and competition increases.

IF the good guys stay in their own little clique then there is no incentive for new racers to stick with it as they'll never beat bloggs and bloggs won't want them there as they don't know what they are doing, a bit catch 22 really.  Turn outs drop and whilst club membership may be healthy, examination of the key indicator, actual numbers racing, will present a different picture.

There are some very simple checks you can do.. look at the number of new members who joined each year and see how many are still there in 3 years time.  At our club we take on average 30 memberships in learn to sail each year.. over 10 years that's 300 people, yet club memebrship is no where near that and on average the retention of a new member is less than 10% year on year, ie if 30 join this year, only 3 of those will renew next year, 2 of them will renew the following year and the year after it's down to one.

Seeing as we get an extra 30 members the following year though, the retention and drop out largely goes unnoticed as overall membership levels are generally static or show a slight increase, until you look at the on the water activity closely and realise how few are sailing and that the majority sailing are hardcore club members who have been there for some time.

It can be hard to get people to recognise this but without the right culture at the top, trying to change things at the bottom by using PH's will at best be a stop gap measure.

Get it right at the top and a most improved personal handicap over a series or special event is an excellent boost to the ego as it rewards someone who may have finished 20th but has really excelled themselves as they would normally have finished 40th.. and lets face it it's nice to get a bit of recognition from time to time :-)

I think a gold, silver and bronze fleet is a better idea -  that way you don't reward poor sailing whilst giving the new guys something they can win.

The major problem with personal handicaps is that the worse you sail the easier it becomes to win.  That is fundamentally wrong.

Yes, that is true, but the situation that I'm talking about is if you sail very poorly for a couple of weeks you can then win more easily.  It would be great if there was a system that provided what you talk about and ONLY that.

So if you know there's something important coming up you aren't motivated to sail well because it will make winning that something harder!

I'm not saying that people will necessarily do it at a concious level (some may), but the fundamental motivation for racing has been altered.

Hence my view that gold silver and bronze fleets are a better idea.  Once you win one, you move up.  No moving down again!

If you have a system, as in golf that your handicap is reduced by good performances quicker than it gets better by bad ones this should even out, as a single race does not a series make. There are bandits watever system is used, and we all put up with it, but perhaps a system where the alleged bandits get pegged back a bit every time they win is better than the status quo, unless you are that bandit. Also if you have a standard handcap series run on a parallel basis, the bandits wont necessarily have the incentive to turn in bad performances.

Anyway our proposal has been passed around our club, and we may see if it works in the near future.

Andy

I think the Dart 18 system ran thus:

You go up the handicap by the full amount of your performance at an open meeting, but you only go down the handicap by 25% of your (bad) performance.

Unlike sailing, golf is not a racing sport.

The best personal handicap is to say, last year I got a run of thirteenths and this I'm up at about number 10. Cup for best improver.

Like I say, golfers can do what the heck they want but pers'handicaps should be kept out of sailing IMHO

Why reward bad sailing and why encourage people not to train?

If people have a boat which is too physically or psychically demanding on their time then get out and find something which suits your style.

That's the beauty of sailing over golf or most any sport - you can always go buy a type of boat to suit you and become competitive no matter your age, size, challenged mobility, fitness,  and budget

You can usually get into a boat that suits, enjoy it, get up the learning curve and measure your improvement in average places, be that OD or PY. Whacky algorythms not required thank you!

The mainstay of of most sailing clubs are the members who are interested in paying their fees, going to the social functions and having a sunday sail 5 or 6 times a year and good for them too. Clubs can't exist without them. Nothing wrong with running the odd race on personal handicaps to give them a chance of some silverware at the Laying up supper. These members have probably been members for 10, 15, 20 yrs. have done all the duties helping run races, spent a fortune behind the bar and have the mostly realistic view that at 50+ they ain't going to get much better anyway....They deserve the odd race where they stand  a chance of winning a Cup and I'm sure the top sailors at most clubs are more than happy that these people get some of the applause.  

i think the anti personal handicap group are missing the point.  Personal ratings are required whether it be a fleet of different boats or One Design.  There is no enjoyment going down to your sailing club and beating up people you are better than week after week.  There is no reason to improve your boat or yourself.  Set up a rating system so that you need to beat people by a larger amount each week and that motivates everyone.  There is a pecking order in most fleets as there is a wide variety of skill levels and given that I have 20+ years experience of high level competition how am I going to get a decent race at my local club with 20 active sailors unless something is done to alter the basis of competition.

Yes I could travel to open meetings, but my family do not want that.  Yes I could find a club with a better standard of competition, but that would not be so close to home.  Yes I could give up and play golf with someone good and with a handicap so that we can both enjoy some competition.

gold/silver/bronze with 20 boats?  there is hardly enough for a fleet without breaking it down anymore.  No.  Quite frankly my loft is full of hideous pieces of glassware and i dont want any more.  I do not want or need to win when it comes to club sailing.  I just want a fun competition which means that I can sail every weekend.  I want the others to enjoy it as much as I do and want to feel that they want to come back each week for more. Personal handicapping works.  The system needs to be good.  Those who are improving their handicap need to be recognised, as do those who have the hardest handicaps.

it is not about rewarding bad performance or not training.  it is about increasing participation.  anyone who wins a handicap race be it portsmouth based or personal based should appreciate that their handicap was an important factor.

Thanks Giraffe, thats exactly what we are trying to do.

Andy

At Burghfield (just off J12 on the M4) we use a personal handicap pursuit race on a Wednesday evening. It is incredibly popular (are there any other clubs that have an AVERAGE mid-week turnout of 60 boats?).

The details of how the handicaps are calculated are all at: http://www.burghfieldsailing.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=14&MMN_position=15:15 - http://www.burghfieldsailing.org/index.php?module=pagemaster &PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=14&MMN_position= 15:15

Basically, the pursuit race has starts every 30 seconds. Every boat has a base start time (based on PY number). If you finish in the top half of the race, you have seconds added onto your time, while those in the bottom half each race have seconds taken off. The actual number of seconds is calculated based on how many boats are racing and your actual position. The seconds are rounded up to give a starting number: with most boats somewhere between -3 and + 3 minutes. The actual number of seconds per boat is remembered for the next week, so that your total / personal start time is continually varied during the season: but over time more and more boats finish closer and closer together!

There are two prizes for the series: 1 for the normal best 7 out of 18 races (which is incredibly hard to win: as the better you do the more you get penalised the next time). and 1 for who can get the highest personal handicap number.

Does it work? Apart from the Oppies starting in nice clear wind - and the evening wind dropping for all the other boats! Or the RS400's who only get a 30 minute race, when others are getting up to 75 mins. Or the difficulties of overtaking 20 boats on a short run. Or the better you do the harder it is the next time.... Apart from that, its the 75 boats racing at the same time, followed by a meal and drink in the club, that shows it must work!

Cheers, Chris

RS400 1254

RS-Vareo 294

BUT we don't use personal handicaps for the normal Sunday fleet and handicap racing. This is where "the best man wins", but the personal handicap races do allow a lot of: "I can beat him on a Sunday, I should be able to beat him on a Wednesday" But when you are starting 3 or 4 minutes (and 20 boats!) behind him, it makes it very hard.

"Very hard" means you have to try harder, and try different tactics, and make sure you make no mistakes, and get the inside line on all the buoys, but still be to windward on all the legs, without getting luffed out of existence etc.

It gives different racing - and the variety seems to work well and attracts many different people.

Like at your club the idea is not to replace standard handicap racing, but to use it for one of the series, parallel to the standard handicaps. The initial handicaps will be calculated from the sailwave results from standard handicap racing, with small additional  modifications for any boat that has placed in any handicap series, we would expect these guys to be contesting the standard series anyway, and hope to spread the prizes. Handicaps would then be modified in a similar way to your series, with varying deductions of handicap for being in first three, and a slightly slower gain if you place in the bottom half. Initial handicap would be made from an average from a  minimum of three standard handicap races.

Precise numbers not yet decided for penalisations etc, still at discussion stage.

Andy,

Take a look at the Burghfield calculation page (pointed to above). We have been using an automated results service using Sailwave for 3 or 4 years: With the right file parameters, we just enter the finishing results: and the personal handicaps for next time are all shown. If you want to discuss in more detail, there are e-mail addresses for BSC on the web-site.

At the start of each series, everyone's personal handicap is pegged back by 50%: If you were good on +5, you start the next series on +2.5. If you were a beginner on -6, you start the next series on -3. This seems to work without over-penalising the good people at the start of the series - and we need the good people sailing, as it helps to encourage everyone else.

84 people entered on Wednesday evening: with the pursuit race meaning everyone SHOULD finish at the same time, and the personal handicap meaning everyone DOES finish at the same time!!