How USATT ratings work

Every player who competes in a USATT-sanctioned table tennis tournament has a rating — a number, typically between a few hundred and about 2900, that estimates playing strength. After each sanctioned tournament, ratings are recalculated from match results: beat someone and you gain points, lose and you give them up. This page explains how the system works. Adequate Ratings is an independent archive and is not affiliated with USA Table Tennis; the rules below are USATT's published rules, with sources at the bottom.

The point exchange chart

Every match moves points from the loser to the winner. How many depends on the rating gap between the two players and on who won. When the favorite wins, few points move. When the underdog wins, many do.

Two things follow from the chart. First, an upset is worth far more than an expected win: beating a player rated 250 points above you gains 50 points, while beating a player 250 points below you gains nothing. Second, exchanges are symmetric — whatever the winner gains, the loser loses. This chart has been remarkably stable: it has been in use since at least 1989.

How a tournament is processed

Reading each match off the chart is only the final step. For tournaments processed before December 22, 2025 — which is nearly all of the archive — USATT used a four-pass procedure:

1. Rated-player screening. Players whose raw results imply an unusually large gain are flagged. A net gain of 50–74 points led to a first-tier adjustment (pre-tournament rating plus the net gain); 75 or more triggered a second tier, where the adjusted rating was based on averaging the pre-tournament rating with the average of the player's best win and worst loss. Adjustments could raise a rated player's starting rating for the final calculation, but never lower it.
2. Initial ratings for unrated players. A player entering without a rating gets one from their results: with both wins and losses, the average of their best win and worst loss; with all wins or all losses, the median rating their results imply. The legacy minimum initial rating was 75.
3. Final adjustment. A second adjustment pass, this time including the newly rated players.
4. Final exchanges. Every match is scored off the exchange chart using the adjusted ratings, and each player's net change is applied.

This is why a player's published gain sometimes differs from what you would get by reading their matches straight off the chart: the exchange may have been computed against an opponent's adjusted rating rather than the rating printed on the wall chart.

Unrated players

An unrated player's pre-tournament rating is shown as Unrated, not zero. USATT assigns an initial rating from their results (step 2 above), then the final pass exchanges points from that initial rating. Their first published rating is the initial rating plus their net points from the final pass.

The December 22, 2025 changes

On November 21, 2025, USATT announced an improved ratings process that applies to tournaments played on or after December 22, 2025. The exchange chart is unchanged, but the adjustment machinery around it was revised: new standard criteria for adjustments (a net gain of 60+, or 40+ with two wins of 20+ points each), special criteria for very large gains (150+, or a single 50-point win), explicit handling of estimated ratings, a minimum initial rating of 200, and a low-rating safeguard.

Why some point breakdowns are unavailable here

This archive shows per-match point changes from the best available source, in this order: official source data, ledgers recovered from archived SimplyCompete rating pages, and finally our own calculation — but a calculated breakdown is shown only when it exactly reproduces the player's official final rating from their starting rating. When none of those succeed (for example, when a historical tournament involved manual rating overrides, or intermediate adjustment data was never published), the breakdown is labeled unavailable rather than estimated. We never force per-match numbers to fit an official total.

Sources

• USATT, "New Improvements to USATT Rating System" (November 21, 2025)
• USATT, "Ratings System Explained" chart (August 7, 2025)
• Archived official rating-system rules, 2018–2023 era
• Archived official rating-system description, 2012 era