How WPPR points are calculated, and what your Thursday night is actually worth

Every so often somebody wins a weeknight tournament, checks their IFPA profile a month later, and finds 0.87 points sitting there. Then somebody else finishes ninth at a big event and collects more than that. The reaction is usually that the system is broken. It is not broken. It is just a formula that almost nobody has read.

This post walks through that formula the way we implement it, which means it is the same arithmetic the WPPR tab shows on every event in our tournament list. Nothing here is a secret. It is all in the IFPA rulebook. It is simply written in the register of a rulebook.

The one-line version

Tournament value tells you how big the prize pot of points is. TGP tells you what fraction of that pot the event is allowed to pay out. The distribution curve tells you how the pot is split between the players.

Three steps, in that order. Everything else is detail.

Step one: tournament value, which is about who came, not how many

The pot starts at zero and gets three contributions.

Base value. Every rated player in the field adds 0.5, and that part stops counting at 64 players. So the base tops out at 32 points no matter whether 64 or 260 people show up. A monster field is not automatically worth more than a very good one.

Rating value. Each rated player contributes based on their IFPA rating, on a straight line: rating multiplied by 0.000546875, minus 0.703125, floored at zero. Work through it and a player has to be rated somewhere north of about 1,285 before they add anything at all. Only the top 64 contributors count, and the whole rating component is capped at 25 points.

Ranking value. Each ranked player contributes on a curve based on world rank: the natural log of their rank times -0.211675054, plus 1.459827968, floored at zero. That expression hits zero around rank 990, which is the practical cutoff. Rank 1 is worth about 1.46 on its own, rank 100 about 0.48, rank 500 about 0.14. Top 64 again, capped at 50 points.

Add the three and you have the tournament value, which maxes out at 107 for an event where the entire planet's top 64 turn up. A well-attended local weekly usually lands in the single digits, and that is normal.

The lesson buried in the caps: one very strong player is worth more to an event's value than a dozen unranked ones. If you run tournaments and want them to be worth something, chase the deep field, not the big one.

Step two: TGP, the multiplier that quietly decides everything

Tournament Grading Percentage is the IFPA's answer to a real problem: a single three-ball game decides very little, and an event should not pay like a championship because eleven people entered and one got lucky.

TGP is driven by how much meaningful play happened. More games per player, more rounds, a real finals structure, all of it pushes the percentage up. A short one-round event might grade at 20 percent. A long league season or a multi-day event can grade above 100 percent, because the scale keeps going for events that genuinely ask a lot.

Then the arithmetic is brutally simple. First place gets tournament value times TGP. An event worth 10 points of value at 40 percent TGP pays its winner 4.

This is the number that catches organizers out. Doubling your field barely moves the pot. Adding another round of qualifying so that everybody plays eight games instead of four can move it enormously.

Where our estimate gets its TGP

Because we show an estimate before IFPA has processed an event, we have to guess the grade, and we would rather be transparent about which guess we used. The WPPR tab labels the source. In order of precedence:

1. An override an admin has typed in, because they know something the data does not.
2. IFPA's own processed grade for the event, scraped from the tournament's IFPA page. Once this exists it is the truth, because it is the number the rankings actually used.
3. Match Play's estimate, entered by the organizer when they set the tournament up.
4. The grade IFPA gave the previous edition of the same recurring event, which for a weekly that has run the same format for two years is usually spot on.
5. Failing all of that, 100 percent, clearly labelled as an assumption.

If the tab says the source is "default", read the whole estimate with suspicion. If it says "ifpa", the number is as good as ours can get.

Step three: the split, which is where ninth place gets paid

Now the pot gets distributed, and this is the part people find genuinely counterintuitive.

Ten percent of the first-place value is a linear pot. It slides evenly down the standings, so everybody who entered gets a slice. Last place in a forty-person event walks away with something. It is small. It is not nothing, and over a season of showing up it adds up in a way that surprises people.

The other ninety percent decays cubically. The decay runs over the top half of the rated field, capped at 64 positions, and the curve is steep. Roughly: take how far down the standings you finished as a fraction of that half-field, raise it to the 0.7, subtract from one, then cube the result. Cubing is what makes the drop feel vicious. Second place in a field of forty does not collect half of what first collected. Closer to seventy percent of it. By eighth or ninth the dynamic share is down to roughly a tenth of what the winner took, and the small linear slice is a real part of what is left.

Tied positions share the average of the slots they occupy, the way IFPA awards them, which is a small detail that matters enormously if your event ends with a four-way tie for fifth.

Put the whole thing together and you get the thing everyone eventually notices: winning a small strong event beats finishing mid-pack at a huge one. The pot is driven by the top of the field, and the curve is driven by how close to the top you finished.

Reading the WPPR tab

Open any completed event from the tournament directory and pick the WPPR tab. You get:

• The field count and how many of them were rated, since unrated players contribute nothing to value.
• Base, rating value and ranking value broken out, so you can see which component the event leaned on.
• The TGP used and where it came from.
• First-place value, then a row per player with their linear share, their dynamic share and the total.

When an event has a linked qualifier and finals, we merge the two halves into one field before doing any of this, because that is how IFPA treats them. There is a caveat about that on the tab. When Match Play itself linked the pair, its TGP estimate already covers both halves, so we take the larger rather than adding them and double-counting.

It is an estimate. It says so on the page. But it reproduces Match Play's own estimator to the cent on events where we can compare, and once IFPA processes the event and we pick up the real grade, the estimate usually lands within a few hundredths.

So what is your Thursday night worth?

Honestly? Usually under a point. A typical weekly with a couple of dozen players, half of them rated, no IFPA top-500 in the room, and a four-round format grading somewhere in the thirties, pays its winner a fraction of a WPPR and pays tenth place a rounding error.

That is fine. The ranking system is built to reward a season, not an evening. Twenty weeklies where you make the finals half the time will move your rank a great deal more than one heroic night. Which is a reasonable way for a ranking to behave, when you think about it.

If you want to see the season adding up, your profile's Results tab lists every event here alongside your full IFPA-sanctioned history, including events from outside our data. The Minnesota rankings page shows where the local field sits and how the state championship race is going, and the IFPA calendar on the Pulse page lists what is coming up that you could enter next.

Related reading: what IFPA rank, IFPA rating and Match Play rating each measure, how to scout an event before you play it, and how to follow one while it is running. Everything else is on the blog index.