Teams in Table Tennis

Everyone loves to play on a team.

• You play for each other,
• help each other,
• and feel proud of each other.
• Teams are a great idea.

Done wrong, team-play systems for local table-tennis leagues can be inconvenient and unbalanced.

• A missing player breaks up the play sequence.
• Drop-in players are excluded.
• Team members don't get to play with each other.
• Outcomes are too predictable, so team balance becomes a huge problem.
  • Ratings are such a strong predictor of outcomes that when players are 100 points apart in rating, upsets are about 1 in 8 (12.5%).
  • Even with near-perfect balance among teams, most pair-wise matches, and therefore the team results, are known in advance:
  • Boring!

Here is a way to do it right. Follow the normal round-robin format for club touraments: weekly, drop-in groups with segregated levels. Just add Team Scoring.

To get a Team Score, simply add up the rating changes of all the players on the team.

That's all there is to it!

• A team with members that won is a team that improved their ratings that day, and they deserve to win!
• And a team with members whose ratings fell will lose. That's justice.
• Now you can root for each other: when you win, they win, and when they win, you win!
• Help each other out, be interested in each other's skills, play for something bigger than yourself.
• Everyone will improve, and some team will win a trophy.

Why it's not bad:

• No change to the round-robin organization.
• No problem if drop-in players show up; they can play in the round robin and simply don't get counted in any team's results.
• No problem if a team member is missing. Their rating change is zero, so it neither hurts nor helps their team. You can't win by not being there, but you won't lose either.
• No balance problems:
  • Players still play within their level on a round-robin table.
  • Team members can even play each other; rating changes cancel.
  • Results are much harder to predict.

Why it's good:

• All teams are automatically balanced. Everyone is equal in this system. Anyone, expert or beginner, can improve or deteriorate.
• Teammates win by helping each other get better.
• Good players will talk to new players much more, and take an interest in them and their skills, instead of just talking to similar-level players on their same table.
• Teams can win by helping each other to improve, especially rapidly-improving beginners. Promising new recruits are the biggest potential asset to a team, if you can get them to join, play a lot, and improve.
• Parents can even be on the same team as their kids -- and kids will probably contribute more to the team's success! Perfect!
• The size of an upset is automatically incorporated into the scoring. An upset between players 200 points apart is a huge event, and should count more than an upset between players 10 points apart. Ratings take care of that.

Let's do it!

---

An old
Proposal for a
Ratings-based League

• Schedule: a season of 10 weeks.
• Cost:
  • $40 for members, $60 for non-members, which includes gym fee.
  • This is the normal gym fee plus ?$10? per player.
  • Paid in advance for easy bookkeeping and to motivate regular attendance!
• Team selection:
  • pick your own teams of up to 5 players each;
  • any unassigned players will be assigned so as to maximize skill variation within teams.
• Format: weekly round-robin drop-in tournament.
  • Non-team-members can also play, paying the regular gym fee.
  • Cumulative rating changes is the team score for the tournament.
  • Players actually present are sorted by rating and put into groups.
  • A player who won a group the last week will be moved up a group.
  • A player who lost a group the last week will be moved down a group.
  • Play matches round-robin, all possible pairs, within each group.
  • Match is 3 out of 5 games to 11 points.
  • If time is tight, do 2 out of 3 games to 11 points.
  • Record and enter your results.
  • Organizer will:
    • calculate rating changes for each player and each match.
    • sum up rating changes for team's members, that's the team score.
  • Team scores for the week and season are posted the next week
• Ratings: Initial player ratings will be the organizer's best guess, incorporating USATT and/or other available ratings. Initial rating guesses will be made on the high side if the data doesn't justify precision. A meaningfully stable current rating should be possible by using the last 10 or so matches with league participants (e.g., 2 or 3 round-robin days, possibly at other clubs).
• Awards: at the end of the season.

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