BWF world rankings are generally calculated over a rolling 52-week (~1 year) period. The 10 best tournament results during the last 52 weeks are used in calculating the ranking points of a player.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Badminton World Federation (BWF) froze the world rankings earlier this year. The rankings that are currently in place correspond to the 52-week period from 15-March-2020 to 24-March-2019 (NOT the 52-week period preceding today, 29-Aug-20 to 31-Aug-19).
With the resumption of tournaments in the coming months, the frozen rankings will slowly be unfrozen based on this BWF document.
This is how the new, unfrozen rankings will be calculated.
- BWF World rankings will NOT be unfrozen in 2020. The rankings will be unfrozen earliest by 2021, even though tournaments are set to resume in second half of 2020.
- The rankings will be unfrozen in 2021, after a “consistent” number of tournaments are completed in 2021.
- When the rankings get unfrozen in 2021, tournaments from 2021 and 2020 will be included in the rankings calculation. However, the tournaments from 2020 will carry a decreased value in the calculation. (The decreasing factor will be announced later.)
In addition to this, for each week added to 2021 in the calculation, the two oldest weeks will be dropped off .
A separate tentative world ranking (Tentative WR) will be introduced for seeding purposes for the tournaments in the remainder of 2020. This tentative world ranking “may” be further used for the tournaments in 2021. Tentative WR will include points from Denmark I & II, Asia I & II and the HSBC World Tour Finals.
Interpretation from 360Badminton
The document from BWF is slightly vague and open to interpretation in some areas. The following example is based solely on our analysis.
In a possible scenario, after successful resumption of tournaments in January and February in 2021, let us consider that the BWF rankings gets unfrozen on 1-March-2021.
On 1-March-2021, the ranking of a player will be calculated in the following way –
Ranking of a player =
Points collected from 2021 tournaments
+ Points collected from 2020 tournaments (but with a decreased value)
+ Old ranking points (Frozen ranking points)
After one week, when new rankings get published on 8-March-2021, the ranking of a player will be calculated in the following way-
Ranking of a player =
Points collected from 2021 tournaments
+ Points collected from 2020 tournaments (but with a decreased value)
+ Old ranking points minus two weeks (Two oldest weeks subtracted from the back for every new week added in the front, until the ranking period gets reduced to 52 weeks).