The whole matter of the points system is now more complicated. As in the Kitten class, Cosmo will still earn Regional points for each ring in which he places in the top ten. That is simple enough.

Now that Cosmo is no longer a kitten, I now have to worry about his Premiership points, and frankly, I do not believe that the way CFA describes this point system is very clear.

Cosmo was registered at this show as an “Open,” which basically means that he has not yet met the qualifications of the “Premier” title. My first challenge was that I could not figure out for the life of me how he gets from “Open” to “Premier.” I read CFA’s “Scoring FAQs” page on its website, and I also had to open up CFA’s show rulebook, and it was still a mystery to me.

There are a few rules that allude to an Open becoming a Premier, but they are very vague. For instance,

“…all opens in any type of ring, e.g. Allbreed, Longhair/Shorthair or Breed specialty, can use the ring as a ‘Qualifying Ring’ so long as the judge does not disqualify or otherwise withhold awards (including wrong color) from the open…” (Rule 8.01)

and then 8.03 seems to be a little more definitive:

a.   Six (6) Qualifying Rings earned under at least four (4) different judges are required for Championship or Premiership confirmation…
b.   Winners Ribbons won prior to May 1, 2011, or as a Novice, satisfy the requirement for an equal number of Qualifying Rings in the corresponding color classes for Championship or Premiership confirmation. All requests for confirmation must satisfy show rule 8.05c.
c.   An Open must compete all of the requirements for Championship or Premiership confirmation before competing as a Grand Champion or Grand Premier.

The problem that I had was that “Qualifying Rings” is not defined, except perhaps up in 8.01, but I knew I had to have six of them. Also, 8.03.b. mentions “Winners Ribbons,” but again, I did not see that was a defined term. The Championship/Premiership claim form also says that I must have six “Winners Ribbons.”

At the show, Juli (who owns Cosmo’s brother, Citron) tried to explain the points system to me, but it went over my head. She explained that Cosmo just had to be judged in 6 rings (different judge) and not get disqualified in order to move from “Open” to “Premier.” I also went to the master clerk’s desk and asked him if he could briefly explain to me, and he did. But again, it went over my head. However, when I asked him about the “Winner’s Ribbons,” he explained that it wasn’t very clear because a few years ago something changed, and it is just the 6 qualifying rings that are needed, no actual ribbons, so I filled out my Premiership claim form and left it with him to submit to CFA.  Now I just had to calculate how many Premiership points Cosmo earned. I figured I would just wait until I got home, so I could sit down at my computer and figure the points out.

I decided to print out the page about Scoring from the CFA Newbee website, and go point-by-point on the list to see what applied to Cosmo for this show. I also went to Herman Online to view his points, which by now have been recorded. I saw that Cosmo now has 18 Premiership points, which was much more than what I originally thought.

1. Any Champion or Premier placing in the top ten Bests in Show will receive points toward Grand Championship or Grand Premiership. The highest placing Premier will receive one point for every participating or benched Premier defeated. The second highest placing Premier will receive 90% of the points… third highest, 80%, fourth highest, 70%, etc.  That was pretty easy to determine for the two rings in which he received “Second Best Premier” ribbons.

However, the problem is that if your cat is not first or second, you are not necessarily going to know that he defeated other premiers, which was the case for me in Judge Patton’s ring. I thought that because he placed tenth best in this ring, he would only earn 1.60 points (I was using the Total SH Premiership number, not the SH Premiers). This calculation was incorrect.

Instead, Karen at the CFA Newbee Yahoo Group explained that in this ring, Cosmo probably was the Third Best SH Premier, for 5.60 points, which she thought was rounded up to 6.0. This is where the catalog becomes important. I always made it a point to record each cat that placed in each ring (for the class in which Cosmo is competing). I discovered that in Patton’s ring, the cats that placed first through seventh were already Grand Premiers. Numbers eight through ten (Cosmo) were either Opens or Premiers, which meant that Cosmo was indeed the third best premier (Grands are not counted) for this ring. Which made Karen’s assumption correct.

One thing that I didn’t catch was rounding. The rules say “In all case, fractional points .5 and greater will be rounded to the next higher number.” For the two rings where he received ribbons for Second Best Premier, each ribbon was worth 6.30 points. The rules do NOT say that fractional points less than .5 will be rounded to the next lower number, but I am told that is assumed. So each ribbon was actually worth 6.0 points.

These 12 points, plus the 6 points from Paul Patton’s ring, total 18 premiership points for Cosmo. He only has to earn 57 more points to earn his Grand Premiership. I’m hoping that next time he can earn even more points than he did at this show so we can knock the title off in only 2 more shows.