Race to Singapore Rankings
3 in top 100
6 in top 150
8 in top 250
10 in top 350


Gabi is GB #2 in the race, and more than a net WTA International round win ahead of third place Heather, and more than a net WTA International QF run ahead of fourth place Naomi.

The steep climb to the top 1007

In terms of the ranking you achieve for the points you have earned, progression through the ranks of the WTA from 1200 to about 150 is pretty much linear.

To progress though, Gabi is entering the section where the progression becomes non-linear. The climb from 150 to 100 is gigantic compared to anything that comes before. It's why so many players stall out in the 101-170 range without ever making the top 100.
You have to start playing, performing, better. The points increases from higher level tournaments just won't cover it - you can't just win a few rounds at Internationals and have that be enough.

If progression were linear, then about 450 WTA points would be the threshold of the top 100.
But over the last 18 months, the mark has actually been 630 points (anecdotally, I think 650 is also about right over the last decade or so)

Gabi currently has a fabulous 341 points. That's an average of 21.3 points for each of 16 counting scores.
Those all neeed to be improved ~50% to 40 points each to make the top 100.

Just a reflection on the size of the task.
Obviously Brits have an advantage in some respects: we have 2 premiers & a Slam to which you could expect WC of some description. A bit of luck with a draw and a win or two can net you useful scores. But that alone won't be enough.
One deep run at a big event won't be enough (unless it's a Slam, or you qualify at a PM/P5 and hab=ve the run)

The point I'm failing to make very well, is that WR170 is great. We're mistake if we think that this is close to the top 100 just because the number 170 is close to the number 100.
There is a massive step up now.
I look forward to seeing Gabi (and others) attempt to redouble theor efforts and take that step; the journey is only just beginning

Continued from the Canberra $60K thread:
It's a bit early to say with so few events this year, but here are the numbers on $25K & $60K per region in relation to each other.

Europe & NA strong on the $25K as I'd presumed. The couple of Asian $60K surprisingly strong driven it seems by attracting enough of the good hard court players that could not play in IW or Miami, and had little else to do this month otherwise.

I have different figures for 2017, from the ITF report, I'll see if I can make that useful in this cintext, as that would flesh out things with more dat points.

Very kind SuperT (not true, but very kind)

You don't actually have to go any higher than $25K tournaments to get into the top 100, winning thirteen $25Ks would be sufficient. If I remember rightly Mel South got into the top 100 on the back of a number of $25K wins and finals plus a few good results in higher ranked events.

BLOB great stuff thank you. Great fun!

I agree although you can go the 25k win 50 pointer route to 650pts it is not appropriate for a player just turned 20 with a significant capacity to improve. Gabi's long term aspirations must be to develop a game that will allow her to progress in slams, therefore she really needs to play and learn how to beat players ranked higher than her. The only function of her rank at the moment is to allow her access to a regular level of completion that will improve her assuming the finance is in place to support her.

One could produce a developmental metric around the median seed score and points accrued for winning any particular tournament.

It would be quite useful in that it helps one see developmental progress where there has been little change in rank ie add statistical granularity to what would appear to be an objective (ranking) stall. A bit like the way in which Billy Beane's staticians developed the utility of OBP (on base percentage) in terms of valuing the utility of a single individuals performance when achieving a collective goal (ie the team winning a match)

For example a North American 25k win equates quite well to an Oceania 60k final appearance however for a young player the same no of points from an Asian 60k final appearance would suggest a substantial step up in terms of level of performance in that to reach a final they would had to have won at least two matches against seeds or players who had beaten seeds with a median rank 50 places higher than in the Oceania event and 60 places higher than in winning the N American 25k.

We went trough this a bit with lots of complaining about a Kyles progress in 2017 however the added value metric to the points he had scored through the year would have highlighted that a potential breakthrough as we saw at the AO was imminent.

A retrospective metric is quite easy and accurate ie the sum of (points scored per round divided by rank of player beaten) would give you a value added score of the level of performance for that tournament. Prospectively is more interesting and I suppose you could do the same thing. It would give you a second score behind each counter which would add granularity to the quality of each performance and indeed by summating the secondary scores over any given time period would be a linked but more accurate indicator of developmental progress.

In terms of the degree of difficulty of obtaining points at events with the same prize money perhaps one could consider the total number of points awarded from QF onwards divided by median rank.


When comparing events at different levels you could look at capping the higher level tournament and ignore any match yielding more points than the lower level tournament and looking at the median rank of the next 8 players so 25k v 60k loose the no 1 seed in the 60k total points yield of reaching final divided (48) divide by players ranked 2-9 v's 50 divided by median score of seeded players.

-- Edited by Oakland2002 on Saturday 24th of March 2018 08:36:48 PM

Re. Oakland:
This is a very interesting proposition; a way to derive valaue from each match played. Of course, people would still query individual points in the dat set (an 'underranked' college or junior player, or one due to injury etc.). Over time though, this should smooth out meaningfully.

The problems are these:
> getting all the data in a consistent, uniform and easily accesible manner
I presume the 'live' rankings sites, in order to make their calculations, are somehow plugging in to the ITF/WTA or some other API of match data, and further using a heavy duty Relational database management system (RDBMS) like SQL in order to process the data.
I am copying data from such sites into Excel and then doing a lot of manual and very poorly optimised back-end processing. This doesn't scale up. The data collection needs to be automated

> I don't understand the rankings system rules
Not the general stuff. I mean the umpteen tiny exceptions. I have tried repeatedly to build out the points structure and automate calculation of the points due each of our players , constantly updated on a match-by-match basis.
Where it's just a case of saying you reached round 'x' and you therefore get 'y' points. It's fine. But when it comes to factoring the rules like you qualified, therefore your first round MD points don't count, or superceded your Q points; as a LL you forfeit your Q points; You had a bye therefore you don't get points until winning a round; you gave a w/o therefore forfeit points; It was a Slam, or PM, so is a mandatory counter; you were a top 20 player, so also had to commit a P5 counter etc etc.
I can never find a full list of all of these exceptions in order to count for every contingency, and so the automation gets things wrong.
I would need to calculate the points per round automatically, there are too many matches to do it manually, and in order to do that I need to build a full and accurate model of everything that governs that. Because of the above, I haven't managed to do it. Also, Excel is not designed to do that with large data sets, it needs a RDBMS.

> Would the value be derived form the points, or the points increase, or some factor of the tw.
For example: If round one is worth 10 points, and round 2 is worth 15 points. Is the scaling of value really 1.5 times between the two rounds?
THis presumes that the ITF/WTA points distributions are equitable and consistent across the scale. At the $25K level in particular, we know this is, at the most charitable interpretation, a highly contestable conjecture. More likely, it just isn't. This would distort things, as would the gneral availability of $25K compared to say $80K, and the knock on effect of good players thus dropping down to $25K as their only option. The one $80K every three months can still only attract ~64 players (32 in Q, 32 in MD) there are many more than 64 players in the ~WR 150-300 range that would like to compete, but they can't becasue there is no availability. They have to play somewhere, and so $25K get oversold, becasue they are cheaper to hold and run, and become the default, but are over competitive for the points.
That would, probably be one of the useful outcomes of the exercise: to confirm that.
But, it would skew the onward evaluation of the quailty, or ceiling, of a players achievements.

I'm very interested, but I can't at the moment see how I personally can do it, lacking both the skill and resources.
My initial interest was in simply trying to get a count of the number of GB players that won a mtach each week for points. Not just how many scored a point, but how many had to win at least one ,atch in order to earn that point. Then I got into the labyrinth of the rules on points, and never yet really made my way out.
I really do look at what the 'live' sites do and marvel. Coric's is essentially the work of one guy! That's the sort of skills we need.

Thanks Blob for producing all these statistics and the time and effort you must put into them. It really is most appreciated and they are such a valuable source of information.

The debate about the quality of tournament draws has made me reflect back to the early 80s when the WTAs ranking list (I dont recall that the men did the same) had quality points added to round points. These were effectively bonus points awarded dependent on the ranking of the player you beat i.e if you beat a No 1 or a player in the top 10, you got more points than for beating a player ranked 100. So if you had a draw with highly ranked players in it, you could earn more points than in easier tournaments. It always struck me that this seemed quite a fair way of ranking players but I seem to remember was changed in the interests of simplicity....