Scoring System Analysis from Paul Deeds

Current System

The current system is designed to reward excellent performance, especially in the most competitive races (as measured by the number of entrants), while at the same time rewarding high participation with extra throwouts (to avoid the situation where someone might decide not to race without their "A crew" to protect their standing). As you've identified you don't have to sail every race to win, you just have to sail very well in the races you do enter (enough to qualify). We've settled on a qualifying requirement of doing at least 1/2 of the scheduled races and I think it's worked reasonably well over the last few years (meaning that it successfully identified the boat that sailed the best as the winner). It would be easy enough to make the qualifying requirement 60% or 70% if there is support for that.

Low Point System

A low point system rewards people for sailing against the weakest and/or smallest fleets. I don't suspect that most people in our fleet make their sailing decisions based on the standings, but I suppose if they did a low point system would be good at encouraging attendance at the "lesser" events. On the flip side, it's a poor way to measure sailing performance over a long series when the races have widely variable participation rates.

High Point System

A high point system rewards people simply for sailing -- you can never lose points. However, it pretty much excludes people from winning if they have to miss one of the well attended events on the schedule. For relatively evenly matched boats, if one boats does a couple of more races that extra participation will likely be the deciding factor (as opposed to the current system where performance in those races would be more important). If we were going to change systems, the high point system would have my vote.