If you’re a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that we’ve added four purely mathematical variants of named rating systems to the ranking pages. Two versions of Elo, Glicko-1 and the latest being WHR.
You’ll see some basic info within our FAQ page and can Google for more. To make a long story super short, Elo is the grandfather of most like systems. It has been around for ages and is super simple. Elo doesn’t care about inactivity or inconsistencies. The process starts from day 1 and moves chronologically throughout time, every competitor starts with a starter rating, which is then modified with each result. Glicko-1 is a very similar system to Elo, except it has the concept of “rating deviation” which allows competitors’ ratings to deviate more or less, given when they fought last. There is also a second version of Glicko, which tosses in a factor called volatility — it is a major complication with extremely limited benefit.
In comes WHR. Again, it is based on Elo, but is setup to take numerous passes throughout history. With each pass, it “learns” from what happened in surrounding events. This makes it an excellent system for reviewing the past and in trying to determine when a competitor was really at their peak. Whether it paints a more accurate ranking picture… who knows?
Using the four systems we have in place, let’s take a look at the following events and the rankings at the end of the story.
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