Rating Scale

In order to be a Ratings Central event director and submit events to Ratings Central, you must have an understanding of the rating scale that Ratings Central uses. The rating scale is what playing strength a rating number corresponds to. In other words, you must know what it means to be a “1500 player” or a “2000 player”. You should be able to watch a player playing a match and estimate their level to within a few hundred rating points.

The Ratings Central rating scale is not the same as the USATT rating scale or any other organization’s rating scale. Unfortunately, you cannot reliably convert a USATT rating to a Ratings Central rating because USATT ratings are inflating, have regional differences, and vary widely in accuracy. All we can say is that a player’s USATT rating will often (but not always) be significantly greater than their Ratings Central rating.

To help you understand the Ratings Central rating scale, we have provided videos on the Videos of Players of Various Levels page. If you show videos of your players, we can tell you what their ratings are on the Ratings Central rating scale.

Ratings Central uses the same rating scale for all the table tennis sports (Table Tennis, Hardbat Table Tennis, Sandpaper Table Tennis). If a Table Tennis player who plays with an inverted sponge racket or a pips-out sponge racket plays Hardbat Table Tennis (with a hardbat, of course), we would expect their rating as a Hardbat Table Tennis player to be 200 points lower than their Table Tennis rating. If they play Sandpaper Table Tennis, we would expect their rating as a Sandpaper Table Tennis player to be 250 points lower than their Table Tennis rating.

Next: Event Minimum Requirements.