Scoring

Most of the material presented here stems from work I did on the Chipstead High point scoring system. In pursuing this I became interested in tracing its origins (the Rinderle B system), and started to come across other arcana, like the Cox-Sprague Percentage system.

Chips: The Chipstead High Point Scoring method in practice. An examination of the Chips system in practise.
Chips3: From Rinderle B to the Chipstead High Point Scoring method, version 3. Tracing the origin of Chips, from the Rinderle B system, and its evolution from the first version to its present manifestation.
Cox-Sprague Percentage: another scoring system with some worthwhile features. Fairly widely used in the US, but apparently it never caught on elsewhere. Once my working paper is in a reasonable form I will include it here. One early conclusion is that few people apply C-SP correctly, but use it as a sort of Chips/Rinderle weighting. In a sense it's a sirt of Cox-Sprague without the percentaging.

In coming to terms with the High Point systems I have realised that Low Point scoring is fundamentally flawed, at least as far as scoring longer series is concerned. Scoring Regattas where the number of boats is more or less constant, it matters very little whether you use conventional High or Low point systems. But when the number of boats is different in each race, and the more different they are, the less meaningful are Low point scoring systems. The basic fallacy derives from adding rank scores (i.e. first, second, etc) when the number of ranks varies. Rank order statistics, for that is what they are, should not be simply added together for an aggregate 'score'. Once, and if, I can put this into mathematical language I will include the paper here.

Useful links

Chips: All about “CHIPS” (Chipstead High Point Scoring), Geoff Burrell
Sailwave: Sailing Scoring Software, Colin Jenkins

Background reading

It is not possible to tackle Scoring Systems without reference to the following sources:

F. Gregg Bemis, Yacht Race Scoring, 1960, privately published, Boston(?)

C. Stanley Ogilvy, Win More Sailboat Races, Chapter 13, 1976, W.W.Norton & Company, Inc., New York

Robert N. Bavier, Jr, with Ian Proctor, Faster Sailing, New Developments in Yacht Racing, Chapter 9, 1956, Nicholas Kaye, London