Team Ranking

Small-Boat · Premier · Mixed · Canada

Team-Type

Age-Group

Boat-Type

Country

What is the ELO-Score?

dragonboat.online is introducing the ELO-score to the sport of dragonboating. The score gives us an indication of the  relative strengths of teams across regions, national borders and continents. But what is the ELO score and how is it calculated?

Born in the world of chess

The Elo rating system was developed by Arpad Elo to calculate the relative strength of players in competitions that produce winners and losers (ties are also supported). It does not work for competitions where all participants can come out as a winner as it is sometimes the case in economic competitions for example.
Using the Elo rating system, the dragon boat community finally gets an universal indicator of team strength which allows you to compare your team with other crews across regional boundaries. 

So how does it work?

The Elo score is based on probabilities. It raises the question of the probability of one team winning against another team. And it makes one very important definition: A team, that wins 10 out of 11 races against your team should have an Elo rating of 400 points above you. If a third team has an Elo score of 800 points above you, it means that it should win 100 out of 101 races against you. That is because this third team has has 400 points more that the team that has a 10x higher winning probability against you.
Knowing this definition, how does your team rating change? Well.. by competing against other teams. Every time you compete agains a different team, dragonboat.online calculates your winning probability based on your current Elo score (if you do not have an Elo score yet, dragonboat.online gives you the score of an average team, which is 1500). After the race, dragonboat.online evaluates how our predictions matched with reality. If your team was predicted to loose against a different team (because you had a lower Elo rating) but you actually pulled of a victory, we will increase the Elo rating of your team and decrease the Elo rating of your opponent. If our predictions turn out to be correct (the team with the higher Elo rating won, and the team with the lower Elo rating lost) the changes to your Elo rating after the race will be much smaller.
After a couple of races and and a continued updating of your Elo rating, your Elo rating will become a pretty good prediction of the actual strength of your team. And this is all we want.

Why is the race result service of dragonboat.online so important?

Keeping track of the Elo score of every team is quite a lot of work, if we would do it manually. However, dragonboat.online wants to eliminate this work, by offering event organizers an online race result service that is free of charge, easy to use and easy to integrate into existing event websites.

By using the online race result service, event organizers provide dragonboat.online with all the data necessary to calculate and update the Elo scores of all participating teams, without any extra work for the event organizers.

So, if you like the Elo rating system, please talk to your event organizers and tell them about the free online race result service, that dragonboat.online provides. It will elevate them of a lot of work and causes the Elo rating system to thrive.