Nice shack

Do ya recon the judges would score him less for falling off at the end.You know what they say(always finnish off properly cause thats the last thing the judges see).

did this beat it? Bit of stabbing through the bottom turn

Never going to beat these guys though

How do they score those types of waves , is it mainly time in Barrell , length of ride , gnarly drop in size of wave?

This makes it pretty clear Teatree - picked it up from an interview on the asp website (via surfline) today with the head judge

Watching video of the heats, it seems like it comes down to an extremely fine edge of judgement between relatively similar rides.

It's an interesting wave because although they're all barrels, there's different types of waves within that. So we've got to decide which are more critical and harder to ride. There's some barrels that may be slightly longer but have a thinner lip line and easy to thread, as opposed to somebody who's doing the full free fall drop into a barrel that may be shorter but way more heavy and intense. You have to consider which is harder to do out there, and I think commitment and degree of difficulty are the points in the criteria that we're looking to there when deciding what we want to watch.

From your own surfing experience out here, what's the more difficult option?

For me, not as much as the barrel, I think the takeoff here is so much more important than any other spot on tour except maybe Pipeline, because it takes so much commitment to get in under the lip on the big heavy waves that are barrelling right on takeoff, and to be able to slide straight off the takeoff and be into the barrel and pumping through sections, as opposed to having an easy takeoff and lining up a barrel, or threading one that's easy off the drop. When you're dropping really hard off the initial drop and barrel -- I think that's where the high scoring potential is.

That's the answer to CJ's 9.8.

Exactly. If you look at that on video, it's a short barrel. But the takeoff into that first section, it was super round and heavy and it would have been easy for him not to make that wave. He was on edge and straight into a massive gaping barrel and that was way harder than most of the waves we saw.

One interesting issue at Teahupo'o is that there's the judges in the tower and there's the pack in the channel, and both perspectives offer quite different takes on the wave.

Our perspective is I think more the true perspective as in depth and takeoff and length of the barrel -- which, for scoring rides, is what we need to have. But in saying that, we have video replay which contains the boat angle. Most of the time you don't need that, but sometimes you'll get waves that spit and the surfer is still in there, they don't come out till after the spit, and we'll look at the replay from the side angle to see what they were doing in the barrel, whether they were riding the foamball. We can't let it affect our scoring too much because we need to be true to what we're seeing, but we do take into account the water angle -- it's one of the only events where we have that available. So we watch it for judging a little bit, and just for a bit of entertainment as well.

O.K.you've given me the perfect example here,say all three SUP riders are in the same heat,the first guy takes off pulls in deep and critical comes out cuts off the wave and falls purpously off into the water.The second guys wave is nowere near the quality of the 1st,so nice cover up but not in the running.Now the 3rd guy(world champ)takes off on a wave equally as scary looking drops down,pulls in and gets blown out with the foamball..BUTthen he cranks a massive turn using his paddle as a pivot straightens up switches to paddle stance and paddles off towards the lineup.Now thats got class all over it showmanship at its best and it also might just win the heat for him even though the 1st guys barrel was equal if not ever so slightly better.What do ya recon?