Help: Ranking

What are the rankings?

You'll see two different rankings on the site. The Session Ranking and the Club Ranking (also called 'Global Ranking'). The two are calculated differently.

The Session Ranking shows the top players for a single session based on their win ratio (number of games won divided by number of games played). We use the point average (sum of the points won during the session divided by number of games played) to compare players with the same ratio.

Players need to play enough games to be listed. So if you arrive very late or spend half the session doing coaching you won't be included.

How does the Club Ranking work?

Each player is ranked according to their playing performance over many practice sessions. The site tries to guess your skill level by learning from every game you play. It adjusts that internal skill assessment up or down after each victory or defeat respectively. The final score of a game does not matter, in other words winning 21-10 is no different than winning 23-21. Only the game outcome matters.

However the skills of your partner and opponents are taken into account. If you win against a much weaker pair, your skill won't rise much. If you beat strong players your skill will move up more sharply. Likewise if you win by pairing up with a stronger partner your skill won't rise as much as if you had won with a partner of similar level.

Do all games count?

The games with one lady playing with a man against two men don't affect the skill and Club Ranking of the four players involved. These games are oddities that can happen when the number of ladies in the session is low (or not many ladies are waiting on the bench). We used to make them count towards your ranking until we discovered that it was very unfair for the lady and her partner (i.e. a defeat always incurred a strong drop but a victory didn't increase their skills).

Note that all games, even one lady and three men on court, count for the Session Ranking.

What do you do with my Club Ranking?

The main purpose of the ranking is to try to arrange balanced games during the sessions. That is, games that are sufficiently challenging between pairs of the same level. So you end up playing with players the same level as you. That said things varies in practice and some games are less balanced than others. See it as an opportunity to shine, and rise!

The Club Ranking can also inform organisers about the best players in the club to let them organise teams and sessions according to levels.

We show your Club Ranking to other players if you are a top player in the club or in a session.

Other interesting facts

A few interesting properties about the Club Ranking :

• Recent games contribute more than older games to your ranking. That's good news, otherwise if you lost 50 games in a row you'd have to win 50 games to recover from the drop in your ranking. Note that this is only true to a certain extent. Although the system recognises recent improvement, it takes times and consistency to see a steady rise in your ranking.
• This is only a simple model to get an idea of the levels and help us select balanced games. It doesn't claim to be perfect and absolutely realistic. In reality people have different styles, play better with some players than others, prefer mixed or doubles, can have good days and bad days, etc. So please don't be too obsessed with the exact ranking. If someone is a few positions above or below you it only means that you have similar levels but it does not necessarily means one is better than the other. Only a large gap in the ranking between the two players reliably indicates significant difference in real skills.
• Ladies and men play different types of games. Therefore their rankings mean different things. For that reason comparing the ranking between a lady and a man is a bit pointless. It is better to compare ladies with each others and men with each other.