For my reviews, I use the NTRP rating to describe player level. But not everyone understands NTRP. Here are tennis ratings explained.
There are different tennis rating systems all over the world. That creates a lot of confusion and is something that the UTR (Universal Tennis Rating) system is trying to fix. But adaptation is slow and that’s why I wanted to create a post with tennis ratings explained where I translate different tennis rating systems.
The work here is not mine. One graphic comes from Tennis Pal and one from a German website that was sent to me by Marcus Ruoff who is a patron of Tennisnerd. Big thanks to Marcus for that!
Let’s start with the graphic from Tennis Pal as it also describes the different player levels.
Tennis Ratings Explained – NTRP to UTR
I find this table quite useful and shorter and easier to work with than the NTRP scale, which I will publish below. For my Tennisnerd consultation, I have tried to simplify the scale into beginner-intermediate, intermediate-advanced, advanced-pro. That works okay alongside the information the player writes in the form, but is far from perfect.
If you familiarize yourself with the numbers above and what they mean, it’s possible to translate that into your country’s ratings using the table below.
The table can look quite confusing, but it does the job in a complicated tennis world! Why do we have all these tennis rating systems? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone just stuck to one scale? Well, of course, but that will take time. I think it would be great if tennis could have something similar to the ELO system in chess (I used to be a competing chess player of about 2300 ELO and an FM title). The ELO system works really well across over-the-board chess as well as online platforms.
The NTRP Rating Scale
I find the NTRP rating scale to be wordy, but I think it does the job pretty well. You can find more content on determining your tennis rating here.
Where are you in the tennis rating scale? And what do you think about all these rating systems?
2 comments
Very nice, thank you.
UTR is rip off of Elo.
It even says so on its website.
https://support.universaltennis.com/en/support/solutions/articles/9000151830-understanding-the-algorithm-complete-summary#:~:text=UTR%20Rating%20is%20a%20modified,%2C%20nationality%2C%20or%20socioeconomic%20status.
“UTR Rating is a modified elo rating system . . .”