This game’s long and illustrious competitive history began in Madison Square Garden with the 2003 Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship. Since that time hundreds of redoubtable champions have been crowned in the search for glory. Until now this game’s history has been segmented, fractured, and devoid of a cohesive and comprehensive documentation. Today all that changes.
It is my esteemed pleasure to introduce to you ChampRank! It is the world’s first database that documents every event to date and uses a points algorithm to rank players based off of their tournament performance. Every player who has ever topped a single premier event is ranked.
Yahir Amat, a brilliant computer programmer, developed the platform for his site ChampTrade. ChampTrade will function similar to eBay by allowing buyers and sellers to meet in a common marketplace, and it is designed exclusively for TCGs.
Today I want to explain how the system works. I’m going to show you the points breakdown for the system, explain why the points are the way they are, talk about what we hope to add in the coming days, as well as some of the challenges of the system.
Points Breakdown
A premier event is defined as any Shonen Jump Championship, Pharaoh Tour (PT), Pharaoh Tour Final (PTF), Fortune Tour (FT), Fortune Tour Final (FTF), Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series (YCS), ARG Circuit Series (ARG), Complexity Card Games Major Tour Stop (CCG), World Championship Qualifier (WCQ), and World Championship (WC).
World Championship (WC)
1st: 40
2nd: 28
3rd: 27
4th: 24
Top 8: 20
World Championship Qualifier (WCQ)
1st: 25
2nd: 15
Top 4: 14
Top 8: 13
Top 16: 12
Top 32: 11
Top 64: 10*
Shonen Jump Championship (SJC)
1st: 24
2nd: 14
Top 4: 13
Top 8: 12
Top 16: 11*
Pharaoh Tour (PT) and Pharaoh Tour Final (PTF)
1st: 24
2nd: 14
Top 4: 13
Top 8: 12
Top 16: 11*
Top 32: 10*
Fortune Tour (FT) and Fortune Tour Final (FTF)
1st: 24
2nd: 14
Top 4: 13
Top 8: 12
Top 16: 11*
Top 32: 10*
Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series (YCS)
1st: 24
2nd: 14
Top 4: 13
Top 8: 12
Top 16: 11
Top 32: 10*
Top 64: 9*
ARG Circuit Series (ARGCS) and Complexity Card Games (CCG)
1st: 19
2nd: 10
Top 4: 9
Top 8: 8
Top 16: 7
Top 32: 6*
An * next to the top cut means “if applicable.” What we mean by this is we only count what the top cut was at that tournament. For example, some SJCs were Top 8 and some were Top 16. If the cut was to Top 8 at a tournament, a player placing 9-16 wouldn’t get any points. Similarly, the only Circuit that has a cut to Top 32 is the 25k. A player placing in the Top 32 of that tournament would receive 6 points, but a player placing 17-32 of any other Circuit wouldn’t receive any because it was a cut to Top 16 and not Top 32.
Points Valuation Explained
It should be noted upfront that any points system that tries to assign different amounts of points to different events is inherently subjective in nature. That being said, there were certain things that we wanted the points distribution to reflect. I’m going to explain the values we sought to reflect in the system.
First and foremost, we wanted to place an emphasis on prestige. There is a certain connotation associated with each type of event. At the top of this hierarchy is the World Championship. It is the grandest stage and thus receives the most points. World Championship Qualifiers are generally held as more prestigious than YCSs, but only by a little. YCSs are generally regarded as the next most prestigious events. SJCs were renamed YCSs after Konami took over Yu-Gi-Oh!, so since the only difference is a name change we’re going to keep them at the same points value as a YCS. For those of you that don’t know, before Europe got YCSs they had their own version of SJCs. The earlier events were called Pharaoh Tours and the more recent ones were called Fortune Tours. At the end of each of these seasons they had a Final in every country that had Tours. These were the Pharaoh Tour Finals and the Fortune Tour Finals. Since altogether they are the European equivalent of SJCs, we’re just going to value them the same as SJCs and YCSs. Finally are the ARG Circuit Series and Complexity Card Game’s Major Tours. I think most people would agree on this hierarchy in terms of prestige.
WC > WCQ > YCS/SJC/PT/PTF/FT/FTF > ARG/CCG
The next thing we wanted to do when designing the points system was to reward for making it further in the tournament. We didn’t want 2nd place to count the same as Top 32 and have it as “one top” either way. We wanted the higher finish to be rewarded for making it further, so the point system is progressive in that respect.
We also noticed that there was a big difference between 1st and 2nd place. While the saying “nobody remembers 2nd place” may not be entirely true, people will disproportionately remember 1st place more. The difference between 1st and 2nd isn’t just one match, it’s having a ring and not having a ring. As such, we wanted there to be a big difference in points between first and second place. We wanted to scale it proportionally with how prestigious the event is, so there is a 12 point difference between 1st and 2nd at the World Championship, a 10 point difference between 1st and 2nd at all YCS-level events, and a 9 point difference between 1st and 2nd place for ARGs and CCGs. The idea being, the more prestigious the event, the bigger difference between being 1st and 2nd.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
The final value we wanted the point system to reflect was to place an emphasis on consistency. While there may be a big difference between 1st and 2nd place, we wanted to make sure to value consistency doing moderately well over doing very well once. We’d obviously prefer to win an event than to lose in top cut, but would you prefer to top two events or win one? We felt that winning an event was worth more than simply topping two, but we didn’t want it to count for more than topping three. Three tops indicate consistency. One win indicates a good day.
We then tried to put numbers to these values and see how consistently they hold up. Again, it’s an inherently subjective process, but I got input from many top players and the valuations seem to hold up across the board.
“I’d rather win the World Championship (40 points) than 2 ARGs (19 points each).”
“I’d rather win two YCSs (25 points each) than the World Championship (40 points).”
“I’d rather top three YCSs (10+ points each) than win one YCS (25 points).”
“I’d rather win a Circuit (19 points) than get 2nd at a YCS (14 points).”
We asked many top players these statements to see how they value each tournament to try and get as much of an idea as possible about how to value each individual tournament. The point system that we arrived at reflects their valuations of the different tournaments.
Challenges
One criticism we often here is not including Nationals from other countries. While it would be nice to be able to include them, it is logistically impossible. Many countries never had coverage for their Nationals. We could never prove any of the information was accurate and rather than have an incomplete database of some Nationals, we have opted to exclude them altogether for consistency’s sake.
It would be nice to be able to account for the number of events a player has attended as well. Three tops from a player attending five events is a lot more impressive than a player with three tops attending thirty events. While this is certainly desirable, it isn’t possible as there isn’t a record of who attended which event. As such, we have to exclude the number of events a player has attended as there would be no way to verify information gathered and it would be incomplete for the vast majority of people who wouldn’t self-report.
The final challenge the system faces is a much easier fix than others. Since it is a computer program compiling all the data, the computer won’t be able to recognize that “Mike Smith” and “Michael Smith” are the same person. Fortunately this is easily remedied and any name differences that are brought to our attention will be corrected. Just get in touch with myself or Yahir Amat and we’ll get it taken care of.
Future Changes
We are currently working to add CCGs to the list. We will continue to add all future CCGs as well. We would like to add Asian events as well and are currently working to collect the data as well. These events would be ACS, the Asian equivalent of our WCQ, and YOT, the Asian equivalent of our YCS. Look out for these changes in the coming days.
I hope everyone is excited about this list as I am! It’s certainly a very prestigious list and it’s an honor to be a part of it. I’d like to give a special thanks to Yahir for all his hard work on the program. We’d love to here suggestions how you think the list might be improved in the future. If you have any, leave it in a comment down below. Until next time, play hard or go home!
Patrick Hoban
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