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Pickleball Rating Systems

Why ratings matter

Player ratings

  • may be used by a player to assess and track improvement over time

  • may be needed to enter a tournament, league, clinic or play session

  • may help players find suitable competition to optimize their fun​​

    • find more competitive players as you improve and become more competitive

    • welcome other players that have improved and are now roughly equal to you

    • perhaps arrange to play up or down

    • growing local player community​; players of varying experience joining each week

    • remote players visit our area and want to find suitable competition

    • our players travel and want to find suitable competition

  • may be used for socially acceptable exclusion from a session

    • better: "This court is for players with a minimum rating of XYZ."

    • worse: "You don't belong on this court with us because you're not good enough."​

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USA Pickleball Player Skill Rating System

The well-known and widely-used Skill Rating System used by USA Pickleball, is problematic for a number of reasons:

  • Most players use self-assessed ratings

    • May unintentionally underestimate due to low self-esteem, excessive self-criticism, or other reasons

    • May unintentionally inflate; due to conceit or lack of understanding of the rating system

    • May intentionally sandbag at a tournament

    • May intentionally inflate for leagues & sessions in order to play with more skilled players

  • This rating system fails to fully take into account many factors that heavily influence how well a player performs in a match.

    • speed, endurance, mobility, agility, flexibility, reflexes, hand-eye coordination, height, vision, focus, decision making, experience, court awareness, attitude, risk assessment (fearless/conservative), composure under pressure, ability to play well with random players (e.g. ball hog, communication), patience, impulse control, tenacity, determination, creativity, deceptiveness, powers of observation, attention, focus, court movement, understanding of angles, ability to predict, analytical ability (e.g. opposition), understanding of tactics and strategies, preparation and planning, experience with wind, etc.​

  • Players with differing backgrounds may acquire skills in an unanticipated order which causes low ratings for players that may have already mastered some "higher-level" skills​​

  • Formal skill ratings are available​

    • Play in a USA Pickleball sanctioned tournament to get a UTPR rating

      • These ratings are based on wins/losses in sanctioned USA Pickleball tournaments​

      • Similar scale, but not the same semantic as self-assessed ratings

    • Request an assessment with an IPTPA Certified Rating Specialist. These take are scheduled in advance, take time (e.g. 2 hours), and cost money (e.g. ~$50+ per assessment).

      • The formal rating assessment process is still somewhat subjective.

      • An assessed rating is a snapshot of a player on a particular day

  • Skill Ratings are commonly -- but inappropriately! -- used as a proxy for "toughness" or "competitiveness". A "3.5 player" may or may not be a tough competitor. There is no way to know from the rating alone because the rating doesn't tell nearly the whole story!

You can see that the traditional Skill Rating Systems are confusing and of marginal value. Self-assessed, formally assessed and UTPR skill ratings all use a similar scale and are all informally called "Skill Ratings"; but it's hard to derive useful information about a player from a skill rating!

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Dreamland/Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating (DUPR)

The "DUPR" rating system is promoted by professional pickleball organizations but there are valid concerns about using DUPR locally:

  • DUPR tracks and values point margin; not simply wins and losses

    • This encourages players to run up the margin of victory as high as possible -- "pummeling"
      • On the other hand, it gives a pummeled team a reason to continue to fight for every point​
  • Requires players to sign up with -- and results to be submitted to -- a central authority, where scores are tracked.

  • Creates linkage between local league play and remote tournament play

  • DUPR rates individual players, even though they play regularly with strong (or weak) partners. (DUPR is more accurate for players that play with many different partners against many different opponents).

  • DUPR is designed to work better in a community with many players that play in non-local DUPR leagues and tournaments (and/or many visiting players that play in the community's DUPR leagues and tournaments).

  • DUPR uses unknown algorithms​

    • algorithms may change, non-transparently, at any time and will continue to be tweaked

    • ratings are entirely relative to an unknown and changing population of DUPR users; no fixed meaning

  • Tracks ratings to three decimal places; this fine grain rating of players

    • makes DUPR awkward to use as an exclusion mechanism (e.g. 3.999 is excluded from 4.0 and up session)

    • may induce "ratings obsession" among players (i.e. carefully monitor DUPRs ahead of a tournament

    • may trigger odd player behavior

    • ​players may try to avoid partners/opponents that might change their relative rank​​

  • DUPR's creators (funded by Steve Kuhn, multi-Billionare) are trying to monetize pickleball​

    • developing premium DUPR+ with more features.....for $9+/month.

      • expect DUPR+ to be required for sanctioned DUPR-managed tournaments

      • offer analytics for a fee to players through DUPR+

    • marketing tournament/league management software

      • organized the "DUPR way"​ into DUPR brackets

    • players are products, marketed to Selkirk, Franklin, Onix, Head, etc.

    • DUPR Streaming, business alliances with ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports

      • big money tournaments​

      • pro player marketing & promotion

      • Major League Pickleball (MLP) with 4-player teams, logos, merchandise

    • DUPR Fantasy Pickleball with prize money

    • Dreamland in Dripping Springs, TX

    • As a profit center, DUPR has not had a lot of success. It's basically losing money and it may not reach viability. DUPR seems to be pinning hopes on a partnership with Lucra that will allow players to place secured bets on local matches!

  • DUPR algorithm is implicitly based on fallacies 

    • assumes all games/points are equivalent​

      • Disregards home court, ball type, wind, sun, distractions, time zones, familiarity and social relationship with partner and opponent, play styles, fatigue, sleep, chronic health issues, injury, etc.

    • Works better for high-level consistent players (pros rather than inconsistent players like us)

    • a DUPR rating earned by playing on weekdays in a group of retired women may not reflect the same level of play as the exact same DUPR rating earned by playing in a group of 20+ men on weekends. It's not really a fault of the DUPR system itself, but in the way it's used in practice: rating islands are formed based on geography, gender, age, etc.

    • In an effort to record DUPR matches, players sometimes participate in local round robins where there is a large variety of skill sets. Players are required to play whatever matches are "randomly" arranged. The end result is that ratings are affected more by "luck of the draw" than by skill. Given a sufficiently large number of these matches, DUPR ratings might be more relevant; but many players drop out of such a round robin after a few bad experiences. They draw some weak partners against strong opponents a few times and decide this is hurting their DUPR too much so they drop out.

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Other Rating Systems

Many other rating systems are in use

  • USA Pickleball uses UTPR (USA Pickleball Tournament Player Rating)

  • UTR (Universal Tennis Rating), claims to bring the rating "gold standard" from tennis to pickleball as the UTR-P rating system.

  • PickleballTournaments.com uses WPR (World Pickleball Rating) aka "Glicko-2" as well as UTPR (phasing out)

  • Global Pickleball Network uses an undisclosed "Elo-style" rating system

  • Canada uses CTPR (Canadian Tournament Player Ratings)

  • IPTPA skill rating (International Pickleball Teaching Professional Association)

  • PickleballDen.com uses Den Global Rating system

  • PickleballBrackets.com uses Pickleball Brackets Ratings (Elo, formula)

  • Asheville Racquet Club uses their own ARC Rating system

  • Green Valley Recreation Pickleball Club (AZ) uses their own GVRPC Ratings

  • PEM Pickleball Club (Pueblo El Mirage, AZ) uses their own rating system

  • .....and many more

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