Hi Fred,
Thanks for the kind words. Overall, we have been fortunate in that as a group, our riders have done a good job prioritizing safe rides, rather than points. Of course, we have a number of folks who would benefit from more practice (myself included
), but our riders are working to improve their skills.
We've been discussing some of the different ways of handling the runs. For myself, I would prefer that we not discount runs that were made by someone, since there is no better way to measure how someone did on a given day than to look at the results of the passes they did actually make, for better or worse. The problem arises in that I don't think we have ever had a true 'round robin' yet, where every rider was able to ride against every opponent. I don't have a problem with that, since we are encouraging folks not to push their horses past the point they are 'done', but it does create a disparity in opportunity to accrue points.
One notion we have had is to allow the person who has had an opponent retire make a run against one of the remaining riders acting as a bye. The person who had to make up the run would get whatever points they gain from their run, the person doing the bye run wouldn't add to their total, since they have already had their opportunity to accrue points with their first passes against their opponents. (Also means the chance of the bye rider to accrue points occurred when their horse was fresher).
Another alternative is to simply average out the total points accrued by the number of passes made.
Regarding your method, if I understand it correctly, you are saying that you eliminate the 'extra' passes that some folks have acquired until the number of passes reach the lowest common denominator?
I can see where that works, although it still will be a bit of a luck of the draw when selecting which runs count and which ones don't.
Always interested in seeing how folks handle things
Regards,
Dave/Alexis
p.s. For myself, I prefer the first option, since it leads to more passes
p.p.s. Most of the credit this year goes to Steve/Eule, he took point on this year's event (of course, credit has to go to his lovely wife Dawn for being the behind the scene work force
). That said, we always have lots of folks who pitch in to make things work
)
In this case though, just trying to think through the options so that nobody benefits from trying to get around them 
