Our Aggregate Series is now rated on a personal handicap. To those members who are just starting out, this means that improvement is rewarded in results. Your “rating” is calculated for each race relative to your last few races. If you have any questions, get in touch with Antony via the usual channels.
here’s a quick and dirty explanation that will hopefully put it in to context.
The VYC yardstick
A Normal VYC yardstick compares two boats to determine how long each one should take to do a race. It then corrects the time that we measure with a clock to say: All factors being equal, boat A ought to have taken 50% of the imaginary “normal” minutes to do that race and boat b should have taken 150% of that time. Or, boat A and B both took 10 minutes to do the race. Boat A should have only taken 5 minutes, boat B should have taken 15 minutes. therefore, boat B went super fast. Boat A: not so much. Now think about boat A taking 9 minutes, and Boat B taking 10 minutes. Who won? Still boat B. They may have had a good tussle on he course, but boat A should have been miles away as it is a much faster boat.
The personal handicap (a back calculated yardstick)
Next is personal handicaps. they compare your performance to what we would expect from the boat and adjust the handicap to reflect where you ARE finishing, not where you ought to be finishing.
Now consider your next race. If you are effectively in a slower boat (your PHS) you are closer to boat B than boat A above, so when you go faster, your results are better overall.
There is a catch though. We recalculate the handicap after each aggregate race. So if you go better, your “new” yardstick for next time goes down a little bit.
Long and the short of it, if you are improving heaps every race of the aggregate series ,you’ll do a lot of winning!
Your handicap can be found in the NHC1 and BCR columns of the results
If you scroll through the races, you can see your handicap changing race to race, this is the system in action.