Kevin's General Philosophy for Local Rankings

Context

I've been on the Norcal PR panel for a few years now, and this is how I generally see things. These ideas may or may not reflect how other panelists see things.

Note: These points are suggestions. They are not laws, scripture, or mathematical formulae. To rank is an art as much as it is a science.

In My Opinion

  1. A good view of the data is a pre-requisite for a quality ranking.
  2. An active player gets boosted up in rankings despite losses.
  3. Honorable mentions are generally unnecessary
  4. The actual players you rank aren't going to complain about the exact ordering they are in. Other people may complain about it, though.
  5. A nice PR graphic is good. Smilotron has made most of ours. 
    1. PR Combo videos are nice, but probably not worth delaying the PR. And it will cause delay.
  6. Try to distance yourself from your mental image of a local player's historical skill and really just look at the results within the ranking period.
    1. This is tricky though because you do have to evaluate how “good”/"bad" wins/losses are from historical precedent. Example: What if a known top-ranked player A loses to a player B who has never been ranked before? A win like this can nearly be enough on its own to newly rank B. So for A, would this be seen as a “ranked loss” or an “unranked loss”? Food for thought.
  7. Reward peaks more than punish valleys. But a player with low attendance and sketchy losses can affect their rank significantly.
  8. When discussing a player, try to write down brief player-specific notes all panelists can see next to the player's entry.
  9. Just because player A beats player B every time does not guarantee that player A will be ranked better than player B. You should evaluate based on the collective records between players A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,… The direct head to head is just another data point. Though it is tempting to look at the direct H2H when deciding the ordering of two adjacent players on the rankings, you need to keep the bigger picture in mind.
    1. Note: The 2023 global rank 1-2 was tie-broken via a 1 on 1 between Zain and Cody. In this case, they really did have quite dead-even performances and the event was exciting, so I thought it was a cool idea.
  10. The field is stronger than ever, so expect to see losses even from top ranked players.