The Fuller Number

Originally posted by JimC

Originally posted by JimC

Originally posted by iGRF

A handicap changing because some physical alteration to the craft has taken place is one thing, 

That's a measured rating system, which the Portsmouth yardstick isn't.

Kipling wrote "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,/And every single one of them is right!", and there are probably 69 ways of managing handicap racing, and they're all correct too. 

I don't think the current scheme (which of course is in the middle of major change of philosophy) is perfect, or ideal, or anything else, but I do think its probably the most practical system the sport can manage at the moment, and what follows is my personal understanding/interpretation.

Over the years its changed. It started out in the 1950s simply as an average of the handicaps actually in use at as many clubs as possible, with a means of normalising each clubs data. It moved, fairly quickly I think, to club officers saying what they thought the handicap should be, rather than what they had used that season. 

That was how it continued until quite recently, based on the club handicap numbers with various increasingly sophisticated numerical tools to make the club numbers as comparable as possible and things like spreadsheets for the clubs to use to adjust their numbers. The criticism of that over the years was that the clubs had become too complacent and were not putting enough effort into recommending variant numbers.

When I look at the historical data I've put together I think there's a little evidence that there weren't as many numbers changing as much in the 2000s as there were in the 1980s. I suspect part of that is pyschological, because 90 -> 91 feels like a smaller change than 900-910... 

Anyway, that's changed now, and the system is in the middle of moving away from the method of numbers based on club recommendations to a new method of numbers based on actual club results - the web system. This brings a whole number of advantages, and also a number of disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. The systems aren't as different as they sound, because the actual functionality behind the web system is using the maths in the tools that were made available to the clubs to calculate the equivalent of club recommended numbers, and then aggregate the club numbers in the same way.

So the new system effectively calculates recommendations for every club, whereas before it was considered that many clubs didn't bother to do the calculations and just returned the standard numbers every year. So a big advantage of the new system is that it much more closely represents what's happening on the water, and a feature is that the opinion of the club officer about what the handicap should be, whether beneficial or otherwise, is reduced in influence.

But they key point about this system is, rightly or wrongly, its not based on the size of the boat, the length of the boat or anything else. Its based on what actually happened on the water over the last 3 seasons. So, unlike all the many Yacht handicapping rules which have come and gone over last 50 years, its immune from designers gaming the measurement system, 'cos there ain't one! On the other hand it does mean its impossible for the RYA team to create handicaps for new boats until there's enough data in the system.

So basically, whilst in a measured rating system numbers change because the boats have changed, in an observed performance system, which PYS is, numbers change because the performance on the water has changed, and the system doesn't need to attempt to collect data about boat changes. Nothing wrong with either way of doing things: they're just different. 

  thanks for taking the time to write that down, I should probably bookmark it!