Change To FIR World Rankings for 2020

The FIR Council set up a Rankings Committee, led by Dan Busby, at the start of 2019 to look into alternative systems which could improve the current world rankings system. Finding a perfect ranking system is almost impossible to achieve as there are so many different factors to consider, so the committee set up a number of different systems and ran them all in the background throughout the 2019 season – this allowed a proper analysis to be done of all the positives and negatives of each system.

The committee presented their findings and recommendations at the FIR Council meeting in Leipzig in November. These were as follows:

  • The total number of tournaments over a 24 month period that count towards a player’s World Ranking should be reduced from 12 to 10 – in order to reward a player’s tournament performance more than just their participation.
  • The number of Challenger status tournaments which must be included in the 10 counting towards ranking should be kept at 2, to continue to promote new tournaments and new countries. But the results from more than 2 Challenger tournaments can still count towards World Ranking points, if they earn more points than the results in other tournament categories (IWT, SWT, WCs)
  • The maximum number of SWT’s which count towards World Ranking Points to be reduced from 4 to 3, to reflect the reduced number of SWT’s being held (compared to when the existing ranking system was first introduced)
  • The maximum number of World Championships which count towards World Ranking Points to be reduced from 2 to 1, to lend more weight to the contribution from IWT’s
  • The committee suggest there should be a 2-year moratorium on any further change to the FIR World Ranking systems. 

The change gives more importance to performance at tournaments whilst still recognising those players who support the Tour and will be able to fulfill their maximum of 10 tournaments over 24 months.

The committee’s recommendations were unanimously approved by the FIR Council and Tournament Software are now working to implement the changes for the January 2020 rankings onwards.

Duncan Stahl

FIR President

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