05/18/07 About my Ranking Systems
I had a couple of different ranking systems, unfortunately they've been in a state of disrepair for a while. I used to do everything in Access and output static pages each and every time, as you can guess that's terribly inefficent and doesn't offer any flexibility to my players or vistors. So this is my first pass on this page in a long time and just wanted to bring it up to speed.

ELO Ranking
Developed for Chess by Arpad Elo (Source: wikipedia) in 1903 and adapted for my site by myself and John Anciano, who helped me with some of the math calculations. It's been a pretty good system for determining rankings, winning percentages, and the like. I have a somewhat outdated ELO rankings list, but I'm planning to switch to a MySQL/PHP version in the next few months.

JD's Power Rankings
I wanted a system that would rank players based on their skill level and the matches they play.

I wanted to reward players that finished their matches in two games instead of three. I also wanted to penalize players who frequently play each other, so it encourages people to mix to get the most points possible.

I didn't think it was fair for a higher ranking player to totally destroy a lower ranking players rating if they played. So I reduced the points awarded for those matches, especially if they went to three games. Lastly, I wanted the underdog to get more points if he or she beat someone of a higher ranking.

Quarter Rankings
It works more like a traditional ladder since if you defeat someone who is higher on the ladder you take up to 200 points plus your match points to try to move ahead of that person.

Balance of Power
A home grown tug-of-war system I developed to track progress between players.

First, I have the date of the match and each game in the match listed. Clicking on this gives you a score sheet of the match.

Second, is the score spectrum with 15 on each end and zero in the middle. The spectrum is just the difference between the two players scores. The wider the margin the brighter the color. Close games have a red spectrum. Donuts have all the colors ending with green.

Last is the Power Marker denoted by the "X" on the graph. The marker is also based on the difference between the scores and moves slowly from one side to the other. The objective is to keep the marker on your side.