Introduction

Welcome to the Virtual Skipper ELO Ranking. It is an alternative to the built-in Nadeo ranking, which measures quantity more than quality, as all knows. Top 30 of the Nadeo ranking is actually filled with boats operated by bots, getting their points from fictitious races.

This Virtual Skipper ELO ranking represents the skippers actual sailings skills in VSK! The system also adds a little extra tension to public racing, and a skill rating should motivate skippers to finish each race. It was created because a big share of the sailors like the competitive part of it - to have something extra to race for and set goals to reach for.

So what is this ELO stuff? Briefly ELO is a system that measures your skills with a rating number. By comparing a skipper's rating with the rating for another skipper, it calulates the probability to finish better in a race than the opponent. By doing this for all the skippers in a fleet race, the system finds the expected finish position for each skipper in the race. If a skippers actual result in the race is better than expected, it will improve the rating. If it's worse than expected, the rating will be reduced. The bigger difference between actual and expected results, the bigger change in the rating.

All new skippers start with an initial rating of 1600. It will take some races before the rating actually is reflecting the skills. How many is depending on how far from the average rating of 1600 the skipper's level is.

The amount of points scored in each race is dependent on

  • The number of boats in the race

  • The level of the opponents in the race

  • Your finishing position in the race

  • The length of the race (max 30 minutes)

  • The type of rules used in the race (a race where it's possible to file a protest, doubles the amount of points on stake)

A sailor who is not racing will likely drop in form. This effect is incorporated in the ranking: A maximum of 5 points (*) is lost for each day since a boats last race (up to 10 days). And up to 10 points (*) is lost for each race less than 5 during the last 10 days. This means that 100 points may be lost for a skipper who has done no races during the last 10 days. Once a new race is done, points are regained. To remain visible on the ranking, you need to have raced during the last month.
(*)The maximum values applies to the highest rated skipper and are scaled down to zero for a skipper rated at 1600 points.

Protip

Leaving a race will give you a DNF and a last place. This results in a significant rating drop. It's always better to finish a race, even if you are last. There are usually someone else who are quitting later in the race, and you will at least score better than these by finishing the race. It is also good for developing your overtaking skills to come from behind and sail up in the field. Many of the better sailors finds this more fun than leading a race from start to finish.

The races

ELO races on VSK doesn't follow a specific schedule, as they are based on public races. Some official regattas may however also use the system, like NOR Team Shootout and MLS. And some servers are coming up at specific times, like the VYS server Sun-Wed at 19:30 New Zealand time. In the european time zones, there are multiple hosts and servers coming up quite frequently. It is also possible to use the ELO Racing Discord channel for race announcements (or questions for that matter).

Results and ranking sheets

On the front page of this site, the race results are presented. You should however click to enter the live views of these sheets for a better experience.

The results tab as shown below lists all the races that are scored to the system. By clicking on the yellow box on the top, you can filter the results to only show the races the selected skipper has sailed in.

  • "Expected" is calculated prior to the race and is the finishing position a skipper of this level normally would get in this fleet, knowing the rating of the other skippers in the race. The average of all expected results in the race, will always be exactly in the middle of the fleet.

  • "Points" is the points rewarded in the race. A boat getting a score better than the expected result will get positive points. A boat getting a scores worse than the expected result will get negative points.

  • "Rating" is the new rating level of the boat after the race. It's the previous rating + the points achieved in the last race. In the example below, the highlighted skipper had 1687 points after the previous race, and got 33 points which adds up to 1720. All new skippers start with 1600 points, which always will be the average rating in the system.

An early snapshot of the ranking tab is shown below, and is obviously based on the rating of the boats sorted in descending order.

  • "Rating" is the latest rating of each boat

  • "Races" is the number of races each boat has participated in with this system

Rules

Please note that the host has all the power of decision making for each race. Just like for other public racing, respect his policy or sail on another server. The host will announce the rules before each race, it can be anything from NPC to full rules. And the host may disqualify boats who break these rules. For races that are run under non-protestable rules, the host still may disqualify boats for breaches of rule 2 (fair sailing). Such violations typically are barging at the start line and at the top mark + pen hunting. For the latter, it's important to understand what the definition of pen hunting is:

Deliberately sailing in a way that would have resulted in a penalty on you on real water, but causes a penalty on another boat in VSK.

It can sometimes be hard to know if it was deliberate or not, in which case the benefit of the doubt should go in favor of the accused. However:

If the boat also sails in a way that would clearly make her lose ground in the field, then it is considered as no doubt.

The decisions are to the discretion of the hosts and are final. Don't take things too seriously, this is still mainly public races. And with an ELO rating, points lost, mistakenly or not, may quickly be re-gained. Host access to this system will only be given to people who have a long reputation as serious and good hosts. If you want to contribute to this ELO system as host, please let us know at elo@vsk-team.com. It is quite an easy task - it only takes about a minute to score each race once you get used to it, as it's based on the VSK results files.

Who

This system is based on an idea from Baptiste / Jimi, coded by Harald / euphoria with support from Jean-Luc / Jiel.