ATP - Tennis Ranking System for Tournaments - updated 01/03

A few years ago makiri launched the idea of creating a ranking system for tournaments based on the ranking system used in tennis. This idea was seemingly well received at the time, with much discussion on how the system would translate to Smogon's smoothly. However it seems that the original project never came far beyond the brainstorming phase. Having watched Wimbledon this year reminded me again of this project and considering i'm a a statistics geek with too much free time I decided to revive it back again.

For those who aren't familiar with the ATP or Tennis ranking system. It's a fairly straightforward dynamic system without any complex math that rewards players with points based on their tournament performance in the past 52 weeks. The higher the tournament prestige the more the system will reward the winners of the said tournament. For more in debt information check out the Wikipedia article

Along with the help of some users of the original project I've been busy translating the tennis system to a workable, not overly complex, fairly low maintenance system which (hopefully) fairly recognizes pretty much every active player in tournaments performance.

In this post I shall start by explaining how I've done the translation to Smogon's rather chaotic and diverse system, from there at the end of the post the results of the project will be shown.

How the System Works

As a reference only the point system of the following 2 tournaments has been used:


(W= Winner, F=Finalists, etc.)

For those extremely unfamiliar with Tennis, the Grand Slams are the biggest and most prestigious tournaments tennis has to offer. The Grand Slams' points system will be used as a reference for the official tournaments on Smogon (the ones with the trophies)

The Masters 1000 was used as a reference point for all non-official tournaments. To be more precise these will be the amount of points rewarded for winning a type A standard 128-man tournament. More on this later after I've covered the official tournament first.

Smogon Tournament X (the big one)


As you can see, the points rewarded for the yearly Smogon Tournament are exactly the same as those used in tennis for Grand Slams. The only difference is the cutoff, in order to avoid too much maintenance work, the points are cutoff at 60, as such no points will be rewarded in earlier rounds that would have yielded less then 60 in the original system.

Regular Tournaments (the non trophy ones)


Regular Tournaments will use the above reward system as a reference for each and every non-official tournament being hosted on Smogon. At first every single tournament would be getting the same points as above, however considering the variety in size as well as the huge difference in game rules demanded a more specialized approach. Where only 128 man standard tournaments will follow the exact same point system as above.

As such the following "rules" were developed (just 4 of them). There are 4 type of tournaments, them being:
  • Type A: No difference from standard metagame rules.
  • Type B: a somewhat altered version of the metagame rules
  • Type C: Gimmick tournaments, that hold little resemblance to standard.
  • Type S: For being more difficult then average, these will be treated individually(the only one of this type this year is Smogon Superstars)
A list of all tournaments sorted by type can be viewed in this pastebin.
  • Tournaments with altered rules are worth 75% less then those with no deviation (this is sometimes rounded up or down but nothing major). For example: a type B 128-man tournament winner gets 750 points which is 75% of a type A 128-man tournament winner (1000). Example 2: a type C 128-man tournament winners gets 560 points which is 75% if a type B 128 man tournament winner (750).
  • Tournaments with half the amount of players are worth 75% less. For example: a type A 64-man tournament winner gets 750 points which is 75% of a 128-man type A tournament. Example 2: a type C 64-man tournament winner gets 420 points which is 75% of a 128-man type C tournament.
  • Tournament winners of a 96 man tournament will get 90% of a 128 man tournament winner and the remaining players will get the same amount of points as a 64 man tournament (the same holds true for 48/192 man tournaments). For example a type A 96 man tournament finalist will get 450 points which is the same as the finalist of a type A 64 man tournament.
All of this translate to the following chart:



Smogon Grand Slam

Opens
All "Opens" from LC to Ubers (and doubles now as well) are considered type A tournaments.

Qualifying points
For consistency separate points are given to the players who where successful enough during the entire tournament season to qualify for the finals. These are as follows:

Qualifiers: #1: 750; #2: 450; #3-4: 270; #5-8: 135; #9-16: 68; As you may have noticed these are the same as regular 64 man tournaments.

Grand Slam Finals
Participants of the grand slam finals have the same point system as a regular 64 man tournament.

Grand Slam finals: W: 750; F: 450; SF: 270; QF: 135; Considering this is a 8-man tournament, this means that simply qualifying to enter is enough for 135 points.

Smogon Frontier challengers

Frontier challengers have the simplest point system of all. 2000 Credits for the winner and that's it.

Smogon Frontier Brains

Ranking Brains based on their activity and their performance during the frontier equally proved difficult. Therefore I used a formula developed by Earthworm and Kevin Garret years ago which can be viewed below.

The only thing left for me to do was to translate this formula to the scale of the ATP system through multiplication which resulted in the following formula:

Brains Win (Undefeated): 20*((WP/2,5)*log(GP))
Brains Lose (Defeated): 10*((WP/2,5)*log(GP))

Which gives the following result:



With the current multiplier one could compare the brains "winning" the Smogon frontier to be almost on the same level as winning SPL. It should be noted however that if a brain defeats the Smogon frontier it will still count as a loss to the frontier team, so to give an example reyscarface last year gets the following:

Frontier winner + Defeated Brains
2000 + 10*((70,18/2,5)*log(57)) = 2493

Smogon Tour

Individual Smogon Tours
Ranking these tournaments proved somewhat tricky. In a way they are all type A tournaments so each one hosted with 128 players should reward 1000 points to the winner. However considering a huge amount of these are hosted each year (54), rewarding them this much would flood away all other tournaments to such a degree that it would turn this entire ATP system into a "who played best at Smogon tours" system. As such they have been reduced to 420 points for the winner (128 man) which hopefully proved to be the sweet spot between recognizing their difficulty while avoiding a scenario where non-Smogon tour player have no hope of ever beating the Smogon tour regulars.

This once again gives the following results:



Qualifying points
Are exactly the same as those for the Grand Slam
Qualifiers: #1:750; #2:450; #3-4:270; #5-8:135; #9-16:68

Smogon Tour Finals
This one is one step higher then the one in Grand Slam since it has 16 players as opposed to 8. In other words the same as a 128 man standard tournament.



World Cup

The goal here was to ensure that team performance would be awarded the most here while still recognizing the individual performance of each player.Therefore the following formula was used:

World Cup: (Team points x Won Games)/Total amount of possible games
Team points: W: 1500; F: 1350; SF: 1000; QF: 600 ; NQ(Non-qualifying): 360


To give an example of this, user HSA had 2 wins out of 3 in the first round and won in the second round. His team reached the Quarter Finals, which results in the following formula:
(600*3)/4= 450 points.

As you can see, with this formula even if a user is on the winning team, if he never won a single game the end result will still be 0 points.

Note: Since the World Cup has a max number of only 6 matches the maximum teampoints has been reduced to 1500 instead of 2000.
Note 2: This formula was also used as a reference for similar non-official league style tournaments like the Crystal Geodude Academy.

Smogon Premier League

SPL uses the same formula as World Cup. However since it contains almost twice the amount of games the max is set at 2000 points and since the deviation between minimum and maximum number of battles is much small then in WC (SPL 9-11 matches as opposed to WC 3-6 matches) the team points are somewhat different.
SPL: (Team points x Won Games)/Total amount of possible games
Team points: W: 2000; F: 1800; SF: 1500; #5: 1200; #6: 1100; #7: 1000; #8: 900; #9: 800; #10: 700


Managers get points based on team wins rather then individual game performance.

The Results

The results can be read in this spreadsheet (click) - (updated till 01/03)

For just the rankings as well as past rankings click here.

If you happen to notice a mistake somewhere please PM me about it and I'll fix it right away. Also I don't know everyone's former nickname, as such if you see both your old and new nick PM it to me as well.

Alternatively here are the top 30 users in tournaments according to the ATP system:


Credits

I wish to say thanks to several users of the original project, Earthworm, Aldaron, Philip7068, Jackal, Kevin Garret, undisputed and bad ass for encouraging me as well as giving their thoughts on the system.

Credits to Ciele for compiling the SPL statistics; Steven Snype, Nails and Funk for World Cup Statistics and McMeghan for his Crystal Geodude Academy spreadsheet, their work significantly reduced mine.

Thanks for reading!
 
Last edited:

migzoo

new money
As a fellow numberphile and tennis player, this thread makes me happy :')
I'd love to help/contribute to this project if any work needs to be done.

Also, you should consider implementing the tournaments not posted in the tournaments forum, namely the tier-specific Premier Leagues, "gauntlets" and minitours. They're usually more legit than the average Type C tournament anyways.
 
migzoo

The ranking system works best in an environment where there is little fluctuation in the total amount of points distributed. This is possible to a degree in the tournaments forum since limits have been imposed on the number of tournaments that can be run at the same time. Outside these forums however, no such limits exists, which may potentially cause a fluctuation in tournament points beyond what could be considered acceptable.

Another problem that may arise is what criteria should be used for a tournament outside these forums to be included. Is it only tournaments hosted in the specific metagames forums or do Wifi tournaments count as well?

Lastly though keeping tracking of all tournaments hosted in this forum is managable, keeping track of all those hosted in every single metagame subforum would be completely tedious work.
 
I'm not going to be able to keep the sheet up to date due to exams between now and the following 2 weeks(or be online on smogon at all). During that time Sapientia will be taking over the weekly updates to which i'm gratefull.

Regarding the OLT, considering no true distinction can be made between the ladder performance of each individual player, all qualifying users will gain 300 credits for participating. The playoffs will have the same format as OST with 2000 given to the winner.
 

Sapientia

Wir knutschen
is a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Dedicated Tournament Host Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SPL Champion
I'm not mien, but I also got access to the sheet. Unfortuantly I am busy af in real life at the moment, so I can't update this at the moment. If mien doesn't mind and anyone trustworthy is willing to do that, I can grant access.
 
My apologises for the lack of updates in the past few months, other responsibilities have been taking up most of my time lately. Expect a full update when my exams are finished(should be around the 17th of June).
I don't mind Sapientia giving access to others he considers thrustworthy however.
 

Sapientia

Wir knutschen
is a Community Contributor Alumnusis a Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Dedicated Tournament Host Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past SPL Champion
3rd of May
Somehow the formulas seem a bit fucked up too tho

I'm done with exams and stuff so I'll look into that and update it as soon as I got some free time the next weeks :)
 
3rd of May
Somehow the formulas seem a bit fucked up too tho

I'm done with exams and stuff so I'll look into that and update it as soon as I got some free time the next weeks :)
Bro I can help if you need it, as I got nothing to do until 10th except watching wcop replays.
 

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