Ahoy!
Sorry if you missed the well attended HHSA winter dinner at the Black Dog Tavern on Saturday evening. More than 35 enjoyed the party. Proposed 2016 handicaps and racing schedule was distributed with the usual caveats about how they might all change if anyone starts winning too much. I'm sending along the worksheets so you can see how you did, boat for boat, comparing the last set of data points (2012, 13, 14) with the races which are used for 2016 (2013, 14, 15).
Here's a brief explanation of the handicapping process.
This first step simply takes the elapsed time results from 2015 and combines them with those from 2014 and 2013 to determine the seconds per mile adjustment necessary to equalize every pair of racers. By equalize, I mean that this is the number which results in a tie between each pair of boats if scoring all the races in which they both raced.
The database of races includes each of the Sunday and Thursday races during the season. No pre or post season races are included.
The open source spreadsheet "2013.2014,2015 All data. Ods") is the one which accumulates all the data and arranges it into the matrix which you can see at the top of the sheet starting with column "I". This spreadsheet is attached and you can open it using OpenOffice which can be downloaded for free from this website. http://www.openoffice.org/download/
The resulting matrix from this year and the last two years has been shifted to the excel file "Median Times for 2014, 2015, 2016 Handicapping.xls" so you can compare your times from year to year by shifting between the three worksheets. The current database will use the last 3 years as we have been doing.
Understanding the Matrix. By highlighting your boat's row and column and your choice of opponent's boat row and column you want compare yourself with, you will end up with four intersections. The upper right hand number is the Seconds per Mile number which relates the paired boats and the lower left hand intersection shows the number of races both boats attended from the three year database. Have you improved or did your opponent? The equalizing number will decrease if the boats are finishing closer to one another. Remember the data includes three years of racing, so your most recent year (2014 in most cases) may influence the final number more or less, depending on attendance in each of the three years.
Hopefully I've correctly carried 2015 race elapsed times to the spreadsheet and eliminated the races from 2012.. The computer has done the rest of the work finding the differences (converted to Seconds per Mile) for each race, the median time differences for each pair of boats, and the number of races for each of the pairs and arranged the data into the matrix which is used by the computer for the next step of the process.
After these median times are determined, the computer program developed by my daughter-in-law Rachel Patton McCord and myself, determines the best combined values that should give each boat a fair chance at achieving the season's awards. The program is designed to make sure consistently sailed, regularly attending boats influence the combined numbers in proportion to the number of races attended. Boats with less history in the database used each season or with inconsistent performance may have a handicap number which seems out of wack. If your number is derived from a database of less than10 pairings over the last three years, the number may be adjusted during the season at the handicapper's discretion.
The "Summary 2015 for 2016" file gives the proposed handicaps for 2016 racing. The sheet also shows how many races each boat attended in 2015 and the greatest number of pairings in the 2013, 14, 15 database. I've shifted a couple of the boats with only one race in the database to the bottom as their numbers will continue to be based on the NE-PHRF charts to start off the season. This is the also the process for new boats without any data from HHSA races. Boats which will be retired or whose continued attendance is in doubt have also been shifted down to the bottom.
Finally, I've attached the 2016 racing schedule. There will 25 chances over the 2016 summer to change your handicap number for 2017 racing if you don't like the number you are carrying now! Watch for the official announcement of 2016 racing around May First. There will be an opportunity to join HHSA and sign up for the 2016 Moffett race at the same time at a discounted rate.
Yours, Roger Becker
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