I recall there was also a clause where, in addition to all the other ways.
If you had an odd number of races, you could check who beat who more.
I wonder why this was written out by the guru's?
I seem to remember it was flawed, in that it could be manipulated by the sailors in some circumstances (that I forget), so they dumped it instead of fixing it; the fix being to include discards in the calculation. Interestingly, who-beat-who-the-most can be used as a basis for scoring a series, as an alternative to points accumulation. Bryan Willis used it to devise a his "ostrobogulous" personal handicap system, but it could be used raw too. I think it'd be a good non-discard alternative.
http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/ostro.docFor example in these results:-
A: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
B: 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1
Boat A beat boat B 8 times out of 9 and yet boat B wins using ISAF Appendix A. Using who-beat-who-the-most, boat A would win by a score of 8 to 1. Easy to generalise to N boats...
My vote is to change series scoring to who-beat-who-the-most, while dumping discards and series tie-break rules
