What is a match type?
Every match has a 'type' which tells us whether it's a box match, friendly, league, tournament match or whatever. This is where you'll see it - at the top of the match block. Redland Green Boxes in this case:
We typically receive the match type from the source system but it's also what is typed in when events are being entered manually.
What are match type weightings?
Based on the type of match, we work out a weighting which is higher for the more 'important' matches - such as tournaments - and less important for friendlies.
We work out what kind of match it is from the name of the match type and source of the results. With nearly 6,000 match types we have to automate though the weightings can be manually overridden.
Match type weightings are applied at the end, after all other damping so it’s an independent control over how much levels can change. In general:
- Multi-club or regional tournaments - 100% (i.e. no additional damping)
- Club tournaments - 80%
- County leagues - 75%
- Summer leagues - 60%
- Club boxes/internal leagues - 50%
- Manually entered challenge matches - 40%
Just to compare, three tournament matches in a row (such as from a single tournament) will have a compound weighting of 100% whereas three box matches in a row will be 12½ %. Quite a difference!
Match type parsing
We parse the match type name looking for key words that indicate what kind of match it is. Here are some examples of key words that we look for. It's a much longer list than this but this should give you a flavour:
- Friendly - very low level but still counts
- Boxes, club, challenge - club level match
- League, pennant, summer - shows it's some sort of long term league
- Knock out, open, closed - tournaments
- Handicap - we don't support handicap results as it messes up the levels! Zero weighting
- Racketball - we actually use this to filter out racketball matches but if one sneaks in it's still zero weighted
We default to tournament weighting but any of the key words will tell us it's a lower weighted match.