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Old January 20th 17, 09:05 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Bruce Hoult
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Default Scoring Discussion

On Friday, January 20, 2017 at 6:45:05 AM UTC+3, Michael Opitz wrote:
At 23:21 19 January 2017, wrote:
In sailing you are allowed to "drop" a bad race result. The impact of

this
=
is that one bad result does not mean that the competition is over for

you.
=
This could be a way of encouraging flying along as the cost of one

bad day
=
is small compared to the possibility of being faster than the gaggle.


George Moffat, who was also a championship sailor, proposed that 40
years ago, but it was overcome by events, meaning devalued days.
Dropping a day only works fairly if every day has equal value for the
winner, ie 1000 points.


As someone who has done the scoring at both regional and worlds level, I've never liked the idea of devaluing days.

The stated reasoning is that difficult days are more about luck than about pilot skill. I think the decades of accumulated results show that to be incorrect -- the guys who win contests overall stand out from the also-rans EVEN MORE on the difficult days.