Argue the case that taking an average of players scores rather than simply summing the scores is not a good idea

averagescoring-algorithm

I am helping design a league system for my tennis club and the way that players have been rated for promotion or demotion from a level in the league seems flawed to me.

My argument is that at the end of a session, you total the number of points won by each player and base promotion/demotion on the absolute number for each player. But my colleague is arguing that to be helpful to players that have not played all their matches they take a score average and base promotion/demotion on that.

Consider a league where there are $10$ players at a level and player $A$ plays just one match but player $B$ plays all $9$ other players.

Player $A$ wins $1$ match, player $B$ wins $7$ but loses $2$ matches.

A match win means $3$ points, a loss means $1.$

Player $A$ average score is $3/1 = 3$

Player $B$ average score is $((3*7) + (2*1))/9 = 2.4$

On a total only system player $A$ scores better than player $B.$ But on the average system player $B$ scores better.

My view is that it is pretty easy to win one match. But to win ALL of $9$ matches is way harder. Also player $A$ can select someone in level that they know they can beat. So I think the average idea is very BAD!

Am I right?

How can I argue my case?

Best Answer

I believe, if you want to classify the players so each one will have matches with someone with a similar "competence", the average won't help if they aren't playing all the matches, but neither the total amount of winnings, and neither the amount of winnings over effectively played matches, since, because of the reduced number of samples, every "outlier" will "weight" "too much" in these "metrics".

Just as an idea, maybe ordering them using their probability of winning the next match, using Laplace's Rule of Succession [1], could somehow "balance" how much winnings they have with how many matches they have played: $$ P(\text{player}_i\,\text{winning next match}) = \frac{\text{n° matches winned by}\,\text{player}_i + 1}{\text{n° matches played by}\,\text{player}_i + 2}$$ you can multiply it later by a hundred to make this "below one" numbers "look better" as earn points - it actually create a moving relative scale.

And also, each player probabilities could be being updated through the same rule or maybe using Bayes' Rule [2], or intruding "odds" and opening the window to "bets" hahaha.

Hope this will help you, I your position, I would be creating an Excel spreadsheet and comparing the different alternatives on a table, to compare which one fulfill better the club requirements.

PS: for new players, using this probability ordering, you will have at the beginning a probability of 1/2 instead of starting from 0 (as if they know nothing about tennis). This because you have no information about their skills. This is also a good thing, since you will never have someone like Roger Federer playing with a total mess like me (making me sad about this league, or getting Roger bored), and also, people that is starting in the "middle class" will fastly converge into their proper category.

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