We take the accuracy of SquashLevels very seriously so always want to know about cases like this. There are a few common reasons:
- There could be some duff results such as incorrectly entered scores or injury results messing things up. Have a look at the history of anyone who seems a long way out and check their results. If you see any anomalies please let us know and we can correct them.
- You may have a lot of players with a very similar level so a small change in how they play or an unusually good result can have quite an impact on their position in the rankings. We can't do much about that - that just adds to the spice and the motivation to play every point!
- Some of the players may only have a couple of matches in their history and it takes a while with weighting and averaging for their level to become accurate. Three is usually enough if they've played other players with accurate levels but if everyone has only got a match or two to go on it can be a bit random to start with. This can happen if a new league or club has just started uploading results. If it's bad or you're impatient to fix the ranking order then the starting levels of any player can be overridden. Once there are enough results to go on the system takes over but to get you going just identify a club or county admin and we'll set them up to be able to override the starting levels.
- Maybe some of the matches recorded weren't truly competitive. A results based system can only go on the results so the rankings will give you the order of how well everyone is playing - not necessarily how good they are. The more competitive the matches, the closer those two will get.
- You may have some incorrectly merged players. There's a fairly continuous merging of duplicate players going on and occasionally we merge two players who are actually different. That would have the effect of merging their playing history under a single name and put their level and ranking out. Check their player histories and if this looks to be the case then please get in touch and we can sort it out.
- Sometimes we study rankings that don't look right, based on our gut feel, but when we look at the results we realise the rankings are probably right and we're just running on old hearsay... If the results are right then the rankings are probably right too.
If you feel that a player is in the wrong order (by, say more than 10% from a relative level point of view) then please get in touch and we'll take a look. The system is no good if it's not accurate and that's our holy grail!