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ESL
Scoring, Classes and Advancement
The ESL scoring, classes and award rules are fairly complicated
and I regularly get questions about them. This missive is an
attempt at describing them all comprehensively and, hopefully,
understandably.
The ESL membership is divided into expert and sportsman classes.
New members are free to decide which class they will start in.
After that, members must follow the ESL advancement rules which
are as follows:
- A member competes in one, and only one, class during each
contest season. You cannot change classes from contest to contest.
The
score keeper (me) will keep track of the class of all contestants
for each contest and will correct the class if a CD submits
scores for a member in the wrong class. If this happens the
results
reported by the CD may be different from the results posted
on the web site.
- Any sportsman can decide to advance to expert
at the beginning of a contest season. To do so, simply
register as an expert
at your first contest of the season and continue to register
as
an expert. I will pick up the change in class and assume
that it was a voluntary class change.
- The ESL score keeper
(me) will keep track of "advancement
points" for all members. If a sportsman accumulates
20 or more advancement points over two consecutive years,
the
sportsman
will be advanced to expert class at the beginning of the
following season. The advancement points accumulated from
all contests
will be used. Year to date advancement points are posted
on the web site.
- Advancement points are given according
to the overall finishing position in a contest. The first
place winner will be awarded
10 advancement points, second place 9, and so on down to
the 10th place, who will be awarded 1 point. For the purposes
of
advancement points, all contestants are ranked, regardless
of class. This ranking isn't normally published. I plan
to change
the web site contest scores to include both the overall
position and the advancement points.
- To move from expert
to sportsman class requires permission of the ESL board and
is normally granted only when the
person consistently
scores in the bottom 25% of the experts at contests. Any
member desiring a move from expert to sportsman class should
submit
a request to the ESL board at the end of a contest season.
- Ranking
the contestants is easy for regular contests where everybody
competes against everybody else. The contestants
are simply ranked
by their normalized scores as submitted to the score keeper
by the CD.
- Man-on-man contests are less simple, because
experts only fly against experts and sportsmen only fly against
sportsmen.
To generate an overall ranking, the score keeper will perform
the following calculation: The experts' normalized scores
are
used
directly. The sportsmen’s' normalized scores are
adjusted by the ratio of the best sportsman's non-normalized
(raw)
score to the best expert's non-normalized (raw) score.
This normally
results is a downward adjustment of the sportsman scores,
and is as fair a system as the ESL board has been able
to come
up with.
- For the purposes of the end of season awards, the
6 best normalized scores will be used. For each contest
the experts
will be
normalized to 100 points, with the expert winner receiving
100, and the
rest 100 points times the contestants’ final score
divided by the expert winner's final score. The sportsmen
will also
be normalized to 100 points, with the sportsman winner
receiving 100 points, and the rest of the sportsmen receiving
100 points
times the contestant's final score divided by the sportsman
winner's
final score.
- Improvement compares performance from year
to year. It is only calculated for members who have a
minimum of 6
contest
days
in each year. For each year the performance is calculated
as the
sum of the contestant's best 6 scores as a percentage
of the leading pilot's best 6 scores. Improvement is simply
the first
year's percentage subtracted from the second year's percentage.
That was the formal part. Now for some discussion:
I record and publish advancement point for both experts and
sportsmen. I do so because advancement points show how "winning" a
contestant is. It is possible to have a very high normalized
score and no advancement point, and it is also possible to
gain advancement points in spite of having a low normalized
score.
Sportsmen are often confused by the fact that advancement points
are computed from the overall position and not the finishing
position in sportsman class. Since the overall positions aren't
announced at the contests, nor published on the web site or the
newsletter, this requires some sleuthing.
If you have any questions about your scores, or some other contestant's
scores, please contact me as quickly as possible. I do make mistakes
every now and then, and I do like to correct them as quickly
as possible.
Have a great - fun - contest season.
Anker Berg-Sonne
ESL Score Keeper
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