New Improvements to USATT Rating System

USA Table Tennis has the most widely used rating system in the US. Although it has been effective in handling most cases, certain scenarios involving unrated players and rating adjustments for underrated players have yielded unreasonable results.

Over the past few years, USATT's IT Specialist, Robert Mayer, has focused his attention on analyzing these challenges and finding solutions. After extensive testing and valuable input from USATT community members Larry Rose, Larry Bavly, Bruce Liu, and Stanley Hsu, USATT will roll out an improved rating process for all tournaments starting on or after December 22^nd.

The key improvements to the rating system are:

For unrated players:

• The minimum initial rating for any first-time tournament player will be 200.
• Tournament directors will be asked to submit estimated ratings for all unrated players along with their tournament match results. These values will be used in instances where systematically deriving a reasonable initial rating is not possible, e.g. when the unrated player either won all their matches or lost all their matches.

For underrated players needing adjustments:

• Two separate methods will be used to calculate adjustments, one for moderately underrated players and one for more extreme cases.

For players rated below 200, there will be a one-time rating adjustment, aimed at protecting player ratings from approaching 0. This adjustment will take place immediately before the launch of the new system:

• All existing ratings between 100-199 will automatically be adjusted to 200.
• All existing ratings below 100 will have their ratings increased by 100 points.

 The detailed explanation for the new ratings calculation process can be found here.