Patent Application
20250222334
Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. There are estimated more than 20 million players now in America. Many players want to track their game results and see the history of their rankings. Currently, there are two major ranking systems: United States Tournament Pickleball Ratings (UTPR) and Dynamic Universal Pickleball Ratings (DUPR). They both use game results to determine a 2 (UTPR) or 3 (DUPR) digit numeric rating for pickleball players.
Both UTPR and DUPR are calculated using their own algorithm that players cannot know before they participate in any match. Players simply upload they match results and hope the system calculated their ranking properly with no way of verifying the results.
My ranking system is transparent, can be pre-configured and announced before players register for the matches, and is highly flexible to offer different weights (importance) of the matches to provide a fair, simple, accurate and practical ranking for all players. The same system can easily be extended to other sports such as tennis, ping pong, etc. A sample implementation of this ranking system is available at www.funtimepb.com.
I found no prior art when I conducted a general search on USPTO for Pickleball Adaptive Player Ranking System.
The primary objective of this invention is to provide a transparent, fair, flexible, accurate and simple player ranking system for pickleball. The standard must be easy to implement and to understand, flexible to manage many different weights for different levels of matches, provide a fair and accurate history and snapshot of any player's ranking.
My invention fulfills the objectives by using a simple weight configuration format for matches. This weight configuration is expressed in 3 parts and meets all the objectives above. The system can be easily extended for other sports such as tennis, ping pong, badminton . . . etc.
This invention provides a transparent, fair, flexible, accurate and simple player ranking system for pickleball.
Each player starts with a self-assessment of points under a general guideline for pickleball ranking estimate. Roughly speaking, a player's UTPR or DUPR ranking times 100 is a good starting point. The self-assessed ranking(S) will be in the range from 100 to 600.
During the first five matches, the maximum opponent ranking that the player defeated (A) and the minimum opponent ranking that the player lost to (B) will be used to calculate a system-rendered initial ranking (IR). If both numbers A and B are available, then the average of the two numbers, IR=(A+B)/2. If A is not available, meaning the player lost all five games, then IR=B−abs(B−S). If B is not available, meaning the player won all five games, then IR=A+abs(A−S).
Each match can be setup with a weight by the match organizer in the following manner:
A weight is denoted in three parts ABC. Part A is a number that represents maximum difference between player rankings for the result to be included in the calculation later. Part B denotes the weight method using either + or x, meaning whether it is simple weight (+) or multiple of points difference (x). Part C is the simple weight or the multiplier.
For example, a match weight of 50+1 means the match result will only affect the ranking if both sides' ranking as of the beginning of that day was within 50 points, and it will be winner gets +1 point and loser gets −1 point, regardless of the point difference of the match. If the two sides' points were over 50 points apart, the match result will not be included in the calculation. To include the match result regardless of the ranking difference, simply use 0 for part A. To exclude the match result from the calculation, simply use 0 for part C. Therefore, 0+0 means it is just a friendly practice, even though the match result can still be uploaded to the server and kept in the player's match history, the result will not affect the ranking calculation for the players.
A more serious match could be configured to be something such as 100×2. This means if the ranking difference was within 100 points, the result will be valid for calculation, and the points awarded to the winning team will be the actual score difference times 2. In a typical pickleball game that ends at 11 points, the winning team could potentially gain 22 points if they won 11:0.
Having this kind of configuration allows a tournament organizer to setup different weights for different stages of the tournament. Typically, there will be some preliminary rounds, usually played in separate pools or brackets under round robin format, and those matches can be configured as 50+1 for instance. During the playoff stage, the games can weigh a little more, maybe 50+2 or 50×1. When it is quarter final, semifinal and finals, the weight can be further increased to 100+5, or 100×2. Note that the increase of the part A number can encourage the underdog to perform and defeat the higher ranking team.
After each match, the results are uploaded to the server using the PIE standard protocol. (Referencing my other utility patent application titled “Player Information Exchange (P.I.E.) Protocol”) The server then calculates the raw ranking each night by totaling for each player that had played at least one valid game that day and calculates the new raw ranking.
The server then calculates the moving average of the player's fair ranking using the weighted moving average, for example, 80%*MA+20%*New. The system keeps the following history for each player:
The calculated moving average is the fair ranking that can be published to other PIE compliant systems.
It is to be understood that while a generic illustration of the invention is drawn above, it is not to be limited to specific form or arrangement of parts herein described and shown. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that various changes may be made without departing from the scope of the invention and the invention is not to be considered limited to what is shown and described in the specification and drawings.
