For discretionary channel routing problems, some but not all the pins in the channel are required to be connected by their respective nets. It is solved in two phases: a selection phase, in which a set of pins that must be connected for each net is identified, and a connection phase, in which selected pins are interconnected to their respective nets. A new selection phase algorithm based on a simple score function is proposed. Its overall performance on examples taken from previous literature is better than that of four existing techniques.