Contests - The Highest Score Wins

When I was young I received a Scrabble game as a birthday present. It was a difficult game for a 13 year old since my vocabulary was limited. One of my sisters enjoyed playing since being 6 years older she knew many more words. She enjoyed winning even though the competition was weak.

Was I supposed to read the dictionary to learn more words? Dictionaries are big and after a few hours of flipping pages I judged that a poor strategy to bridge the gulf between our vocabularies. I needed a quick fix, not one that might take months or years of effort, and a boring one at that. 

[This is the point where I stretch the analogy to contesting, so please bear with me!]

What I lacked in raw facts I was able to make up in strategy. I reasoned that if I couldn't achieve a winning score with words all I had to do was impair her ability to make a high score. I became very good at boxing her in so that if I couldn't use a double or triple letter/word square neither could she. To her dismay I began winning games despite my limited vocabulary.

Winning is accomplished by scoring more points than your competitors, not by displays of intellectual prowess. Depending on the game there are always alternative paths to victory. The same is true of radiosport. But (as I alluded to in the warning above) we should never do it by impeding our contest competitors! Contesting is not Scrabble.

What's the equivalent to those obscure high-value words in radiosport? Contest scores are most often calculated from a combination of contacts and multipliers. For the purpose of my analogy, multipliers are the equivalent of high-value words -- working a multiplier can sometimes be the equivalent to the drudgery of working 10 stations. Finding and working multipliers is an important skill.

Multipliers are contest gold. They may be sections, counties, political districts, zones or countries. You can beat your competitors by logging fewer contacts if you can log more multipliers. Sometimes significantly fewer contacts. 

No matter your contesting objectives, working multipliers is always exciting. Therein lies a danger: if you pursue multipliers for the rush of excitement they bring, they could become your downfall. But only if you're truly out to win; otherwise there no harm in the practice.

Early in my contest career I had a terrible habit in DX contests of camping on a country multiplier and striving against the pile up to get it in my log. Valuable time was wasted. That was when I was still a "little pistol". I knew it was foolish yet I kept doing it. It was a difficult habit to break. Honestly, I'm actually not sure that I've broken the habit. It may just be that I've built a station so big that I can crack pile ups on the rare multipliers on the first call. 

But those are DX contests. I'm a keen DXer so my obsession was not too surprising. My attitude is quite different when the multipliers are not countries. I don't know that I've ever worked a clean sweep in ARRL Sweepstakes and I don't care. Others obsessively pursue a sweep. That's okay, if that's important to you. Just don't imagine that achieving a sweep makes you a great contester or a winning strategy. For that, compare your final score against those of your competitors, including those that missed a section or two. That decides who wins.

Other contests where a "sweep" of the multipliers is a popular objective are several of the state QSO parties (especially California and Florida), districts in WAG (Worked All Germany) and some other country-specific European contests. There are others of the same ilk.

Yet you never hear of anyone complaining that they've never completed a sweep of all 40 zones or all 340+ countries in CQ WW. The first is barely possible while the latter is effectively impossible. Propagation can be difficult and, more often, there is no activity (contest or not) from many countries.

The same impossibility applies to VHF where grid squares are the multipliers. Again, nobody talks about sweeps in these contests.

That's quite sensible. Why pursue a multiplier sweep when it is impossible or so improbable that it might as well be impossible. With effort it is possible in ARRL Sweepstakes, QSO parties and a number of other contests. 

Is it the possibility of a multiplier sweep that sparks the drive to achieve that objective? Many contesters ardently follow rovers and closely monitor spots (assisted classes) in the bigger QSO parties to ensure they don't miss any of the rare counties, which may be active for only a few minutes. You snooze, you lose. Many use assistance with the sole objective of a sweep.

Although not contests, you find an all or nothing objective in operating awards such as reaching the top of the DXCC Honor Roll or in the pursuit of the 6 meter FFMA. 

But in contests, the pursuit of multiplier sweeps has little to do with winning. Except in certain types of contests. Can you guess what distinguishes those contests from those where a multiplier sweep is no one's objective?

Those are the contests where activity is limited. It is easy to run out of stations to work in most QSO parties, in ARRL Sweepstakes, among others. When your rate slows to nothing, what can you do? You stop operating for a while or you hunt multipliers, if they're active and you can find them.

Rover schedules and highway roadmaps are studied, you camp on the rover's frequency waiting for them cross the country line, and eyes repeatedly glance at the multiplier window being populated by spots.

Many find tremendous enjoyment in the pursuit of multiplier sweeps. I do not, but who am I to tell them that their enthusiasm is misplaced. If there were many more stations to work they probably wouldn't be doing what they're doing. What's the harm?

In those cases, there is no harm. Yet I have to question the contests where that happens. It becomes less of a competition and more or a scavenger hunt. A curious game though not a terribly competitive one. There is no time for those games in a contest with lots of activity. Sure, you still hunt multipliers but you keep your aim solely on the score. Better to skip a mult or two if you can run up the score faster by running and SO2R.

I like entering many of the low activity contests, but not to pursue sweeps. It's good practice and fun. The time needed to build the score when the rate drops by waiting for new mults to appear is unappealing to me. I am never competitive in those contests, only operating when and if I feel like it.

When RAC (our national organization) recently added a new section for administrative reasons, some contesters reacted with alarm. If adopted as a multiplier in foreign sponsored contests like ARRL Sweepstakes, a multiplier sweep will become more difficult. So what? Do they also complain that P5 is hard to work in CQ WW? 

It doesn't impact a station's competitive position when a multiplier isn't activated during a contest since it has no effect on the results. The only impact is those whose objective is a sweep. It is of no consequence for contest competitors.

Don't lose perspective. If sweeps is you aim, go for it. But if your aim is to win or rank highly, focus on your score, not an arbitrary objective.