Ratings Central

What is Ratings Central

Ratings Central is a state-of-the-art, fully automated, online rating system that is very accurate, is open to anyone anywhere, is extremely easy for tournament organizers (event directors) to use, and provides extensive, detailed, accessible information on events, matches, results, ratings, and rankings.

Ratings Central uses a sophisticated rating algorithm developed by David J. Marcus, Ph.D. that fairly and accurately rates all players, from world-class to beginner, from those who compete regularly to those who compete infrequently. The algorithm was originally developed at the request of the United States Table Tennis Association.

The purpose of Ratings Central is to make ratings more immediate and exciting for all table tennis players, while making it as simple as possible for tournament organizers (event directors) to run tournaments and to submit the tournament results for rating.

The Table Tennis SA (TTSA) Board decided at the commencement of the 2016 Winter Pennant Season that it would adopt the Ratings Central system for the purpose of providing a system that would provide and make ratings more immediate and exciting for table tennis players.

Most States in Australia have now adopted the Ratings Central system.

All Sanctioned tournament results, State tournament results and TTSA Winter Pennant results are submitted to the Ratings Central website for the purpose of calculation of the player ratings.

Rankings vs Ratings

The Ratings Central system is a ‘rating system’ that provides a means of rating players throughout Australia and the World. The system is not a ranking system and is not used by TTSA for the purpose of State Team selection, or for State rankings or for seeding State and Sanctioned tournaments.

How the Rating System Works

The rating system uses standard concepts and techniques from probability and statistics. This makes the rating system quite different from (and more accurate than) almost all other rating and ranking systems. Detailed information on how the system works may be found from the Ratings Central website.

Zermelo and Cantor

Ratings Central is available for use by anyone and already is being used by several affiliates to create ‘Ratings’ for players in their own pennant competitions.

The following two associated software programs may be downloaded from the Ratings Central website for the purpose of exporting results to Ratings Central:

1. Zermelo
2. Cantor

Zermelo is an excellent program that is used to automate the conducting of a tournament. This program, or the CATTS program, must be used to run either State tournaments or Sanctioned tournaments conducted in South Australia. The reason for this is that these programs facilitate the automatic uploading of the tournament results to the Ratings Central web site.

Based upon the experience of TTSA in using Zermelo to run tournaments a ‘Tournament Manual’ has been developed and is available from this website to assist new users in the use of Zermelo. The TTSA Manual is more relevant than the very lengthy manual available from Ratings Central which is written for American tournaments which can be very different to our own.

Cantor is a program that facilitates the uploading of pennant style competition results to the Ratings Central web site.

Contact for Help

It is recommended that before your Club or Association commence using either Zermelo or Cantor that you first speak to Greg Bungey, TTSA Membership Director.
Like all software systems there are certain things to be aware of and Greg can advise what to watch out for.

The two most important matters for new users being:

1. Ensuring duplicate players are not created
2. Ensuring that for new players an accurate initial rating (Unrated Prior) is set.

Greg may be contacted at the following email address:
bungey2@bigpond.com