The ELO is used for chess (and other player-player games).
The Wikipedia (english edition) explains the mathematical background.

For the teams event we will use a modified version:

- Teams are assigned an intial ELO score that is higher (2000) than the standard ELO scoring defines. That means that we cannot use the typical master-senior-newbie categorization as defined for chess players.

- Deltas after a match will be significantly lower than the standard. That's because team racing is more 'variable' than chess. A better team has a higher probability of losing a match against a worse team.

- Deltas for winner and loser will not be equal. That's important. It means that points are not directly transferred from loser to winner and that a good team should not fear sailing against a bad team.

With the standard ELO good players will avoid a match with less-ranked players because a match lost (by an accident) would have a severe impact in the player ranking.

A.

what is the max and min number of points that can be gained or lost from one match. I used to do quite a few chess tournaments back in the day and if i remember correctly, the max was 64. In our case, since we are using higher numbers and everyone is equal at the beginning, is it fair to assume that there will be greater point gains and deductions?

what happens if a team does not compete at all? do they maintain their 2000 points?

have there been any thaughts of establishing a permanent ELO rating system for all of sailx? each type of sailing, being fleet, teams, and match, get there own rating?

The max delta is +120 for winner and -60 for loser, but that's only in the case where the worst ranked team wins to the best ranked team.
Typical deltas after a single match will be around +40 and -30, and that has to be compared to the typical scores in the 2000-3000 range.

For teams not competing, they will not be ranked. No ELO.

For teams completing one or two matches only, they will be close to 2000 and static. Because our modified ELO is basically inflationary (winners win more than losers lose) a team not competing will slowly drift down in the ranking.

After this experiment ww will decide if using ELO (the standard or modified) for other rankings, more specifically for those individual rankings. Things get a bit fuzzy in those cases because we're not longer dealing with a player-player scenario.

A.

that makes sense.
what if for fleet racing, an average of ratings from all boats finishing each race was taken in to affect and compared against an individual's rating. Ugh now that im really thinking about it, that gets really fuzzy.

Should a user only be allowed to represent one team for the ELO scoring?

SINOGIN wrote:

what if for fleet racing, an average of ratings from all boats finishing each race was taken in to affect and compared against an individual's rating. Ugh now that im really thinking about it, that gets really fuzzy.

As we have 'unlimited' computer power we have some ideas about implementing an ELO scoring for fleets.
All posibilities require thousands of calculations for every single regatta.

We'll work on it after the next events.

A.

A user can belong to several sailing teams.
Server will score only the team all present sailors belong to.

A.