Grades, Ratings, Rankings

Submitted by sitemaster on Sat, 2015/10/10 - 12:40pm

With the quarterly masterpoints updates about to be released, here's a way of looking at what many find confusing about Grades, Ratings and Rankings. Let's start with Grades because they're easiest to define:

Grades
There are only three grades. Defined for tournament purposes you are graded as one of the 1701 Open, 4446 Intermediate, or 7243 Junior players in the country as at May 2015. You change grades, usually irreversibly, by crossing certain thresholds defined in terms of masterpoints. Open-graded players may not take part in Intermediate or Junior tournaments. Intermediates are barred from Junior tournaments. Sometimes a club will run a Restricted tournament which will specify conditions on which grades may play together.

Rankings
It's like in the army. Using May 2015 figures we have/(had):

NZ WB Rank Equivalent to
24 5 Gold Grand Masters Field Marshals of the Bridge Army
47 7 Silver Grand Masters Generals
188 23 Grand Masters Brigadiers
165 35 Life Masters Colonels
103 23 National Masters Majors
180 38 Masters Captains
278 33 Provincial Masters Lieutenants
5144 824 Local Masters Sergeants
2257 323 Club Masters Corporals
2188 288 Certificate of Proficiency Private Soldiers
2816 501 Novice in Boot Camp

Bit top-heavy in the NCO department, aren't we? You advance up the ranks by achieving certain targets defined in terms of 'A' and 'B' points. 'A' points can be earned only at 'A' point tournaments which are pretty high-powered affairs. 'B' points are packets of 100 'C' points. When you come top of a club session you earn 40 'C' points. The top award in a '5B' tournament is actually 500 'C' points. These points accumulate over your bridge career - they never decrease.

Stars
People are often hampered in moving on to the next rank by not having enough 'A' points to qualify. For every bundle of total points that exceeds the specified quota by the number of 'A' points required, a player is awarded a star. Example: the target for moving from Local Master to Provincial Master is 100 total points, 50 of which must be 'A' points. In waiting to scrape up his first 50 A's a player becomes a 1-star Club Master when he reaches 100+50 total points, gaining another star whenever he accumulates another 50 points.

Ratings
Ratings are calculated just once for each new season. They are Four fifths of your previous season's Rating PLUS the sum of all the A and B points you earned IN the previous season. This gives us a measure of a player's form at the start of a season. If you stop winning things your Rating will slowly diminish.

A more technical explanation of Grades, Ratings, and Rankings may be found on the NZ Bridge site.