Rankings revisit - a trip through history
It weights tournaments on prize money rather than match length, meaning events such as the World Championship are top heavy on points, and the tournament winners of most tournaments are ranked top heavy on points.
It is a horrendous, even comicly bad way of ranking players the further down the list you go, making it very unfair for those who struggle more financially and depend on staying in the top 64 to remain professional.
And points do not gradually decrease over time, but suddenly all drop off after 2 years. Isn't it strange that one day, Stuart Bingham has 300,000 points from the 2015 WC, and the next day he has none of those points?
I've been playing around with alternative ranking systems. One that has been mentioned on here is the Elo system. I don't like that one for snooker, although I concede that it may be because I don't fully understand it. From what I can gather, a player keeps the same number of points until he plays his next match. So if Elo were used, would Hendry have the same number of points he had when he last played professionally? That doesn't seem fair. If I'm right, that system would encourage somene with lots of points to just sit out the season and wait for the World Championship, at which point they would be one of the top seeds. But we want to encourage people to enter as many events as possible.
I also don't think Elo takes into account the mental aspect of snooker. Playing Ronnie in the first round would be the same as playing him in a final in Elo. Similarly, the deciding frame in a match, or the final frame of a final would have the same effect on the Elo rating as a first round first frame against the same opponent.
So I've designed my own ranking points system, which is fairly simple to calculate. The accuracy of my rankings increases the more tournaments are considered, and the further back in time we go (though it should be noted that I only count tournaments from the most recent two years in my rankings). And so, I am going to work out the points for every player who has played in a cuetracker.net ranking event or minor ranking event, starting with the 1974 World Championship and working forwards in time.
The rankings won't be that good until I get to about the 1984-85 season. From '74 to '82, only the World Championship is listed as a ranking event, so the sample size is very small. But including these early WCs is of interest, and does help as we move forward in time.
A couple of final notes, I am only ranking events from the last 128 stage (or last 144 for some WCs). And I will do a ranking revision at the conclusion of each ranking event.
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chengdufan - Posts: 11525
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