Advancement / Relegation of Players

General

• The advancement / relegation of players is always done after the last tournament of the season, i.e. at the end of the year. This means if a player crosses a points boundary (the upper one for example) during the running year, he will nevertheless continue the complete season with his or her current classification, and only then will he advance to the next higher category (for the next year). Of course, it may also happen that during the rest of the running year, his points will again fall below the points boundary, so he will stay in his current category.
• The advancement / relegation always depends on how many points a player has at the end of the season (usually after the German Championship), not on how many points he may have had at some time during the year.

Advancement From Rookie to Amateur

• Rookies are a special case, they don't have points in the ranking system—instead, the advancement to Amateur is done as follows: A Rookie is advanced to Amateur if he a) places 3rd or better at a P4P open tournament in one of the following events: ND/NE, AD/AE, OD/OE, or b) if he makes 5th place or better at the German Championship, the European Championship or the World Championship in one of the events: ND/NE, AD/AE, OD/OE, MD, or c) if he has made 5th place or better two times during his entire career, at any P4P tournament.
• There is a separate Singles / Doubles classification for Rookies, so a player can e.g. be classifed as Rookie in Singles and as Amateur in Doubles.

Other Advancement / Relegation

• If a player's points at the end of the season are above or below one of the boundaries listed below, he or she will change classification into the according category, beginning with the first tournament of the new season.
• There is no relegation back to "Rookie".
• To be relegated from Elite to Master or from Master to Amateur, a player has to have participated in at least three "ranking relevant events" at three different P4P tournaments during the current year. Doubles and Singles events are handled separately—e. g. to change from Master to Amateur in Singles, a player has to have played Open Singles at three different tournaments. To change fom Master to Amateur in Doubles, he has to have played at least one of the events "Open Doubles", "Master Doubles" or "P4P Cup" at three different tournaments.

Point Boundaries

I. e. in Singles, with 1900 or more points you will advance from Amateur to Master, with 2300 from Master to Elite. If an Elite player drops below 2150, he will be relegated to Master; accordingly a Master who drops below 1650 will be relgated to Amateur.

Starting Points for New Players

All new players start with zero points (for the internal calculation this means they start with an estimated skill of 2000 and a standard deviation of 666).

If you click on "Rankings" and then on the complete list display, you will see that some entries in the list are colored differently. The colors have the following meaning:

• Green: Rookies who will advance to Amateur due to the placements they made.
• Green: Amateurs who will advance to "Master", and Masters who will advance to "Elite", due to crossing the points limit, according to the current standing of the list (i.e. this can still change until after the last tournament of the year).
• Red: Elite / Master players who would be relegated one category, due to crossing the lower points limit (again, according to the current standing, meaning this can still change until the end of season).