KA72.com also doesn't care if you tack or gybe. As long as you return to within 50m of your starting point.
Oh, and Alpha500 means "up to 500m"
not "exactly 500m."
This was an issue when I first coded the Alpha calcs on KA72.com. I assumed that the Alpha500 track had to be 500m long

. In reality, it can be a lot less. Different software deals with this slightly differently I've realised, so some short alphas will be discarded by some software and accepted by other software.
Since shorter Alphas tend to be a little slower than longer Alphas, this isn't necessarily a problem. But if you are going very fast into a gybe, then crash on the way out, you won't record an alpha in some software (sorry I can't remember which was which and how they all worked, but I ran a lot of tests on this at one point.)
Dylan.