In the past 5 – 10 years of TOPL the season has largely be ruled with an iron fist by either JRF or AB being the only names on the Season Champ Trophy.

The TOPL Leadership recognizes that creates apathy toward regular season nights with a large majority of our players never really in the hunt for an opportunity to win a Season Champ award.

With the transition to the FSPA/PAPA League management software this opens up a whole new world of possibilities one being the creation of a new handicapping system that, with the help of Joe Schrober, we have been able to implement!

The new system will work as follows:

After players have participated in 14 total weeks they will be assigned what we are calling a lifetime %.  The lifetime % is a calculation based on every single league night a player has ever attended that is currently entered into our system.  The reason we are using a lifetime percentage rather than the current season percentage is that the season percentage can vary wildly season to season and there can be quite the swing as a percentage settles down during the season.  The lifetime % will be more steady so players can count on or expect the points they are going to receive each night.

Based on a players lifetime percentage players will now receive bonus points on a every league night based on that percentage, the break down being:

20% – 30% – 6 points

30% – 40% – 5 points

40% – 45% – 4 points

45% – 50% – 3 points

50% – 55% – 2 points

55% – 60% – 1 point

This means that potentially a player who’s current lifetime percentage is in the 20% – 30% range, in the event they were able to achieve a 16 on the night would then actually earn 22 points on that given league night.

The lifetime percentage will decay in order to represent a players current skill level.  After a player has 90 weeks (6 seasons) of attended league nights in the system, the oldest results will drop off and we will calculate the lifetime percentage based on the most current 90 league nights in the system.  We feel this will give us a good sampling with which to base the lifetime percentage on while at the same time accurately reflecting a players improvement or decline as time goes on.

The award for this new system will be exactly the same as it is for the current season.  The players name on a trophy and a “Replay” into the next season.  With that in mind the TOPL Leadership has also decided to retire the Pinball Wizard (High Score award trophy) and repurpose it for this new System.  We feel that the high score award while fun to track is not relevant from an award perspective, chances are if you winning the season you most likely are going to win high scores as well so it just represents the rich getting richer so to speak.  All the current plaques will be removed from the trophy and we will award our first Pinball Wizard plaque under this new system in the upcoming season!

With the retirement of the high score award we are also hoping this will help speed up league play since player 4 when in the lead on a machine at the end of ball 3 does not have to play if they don’t want to in order to attempt to achieve a high score on the night.

Finally this does not replace the regular Season Champ award, that will remain in place exactly the same and our submission for WPPR points during the season will be based off those standings.

We hope this shows our continued commitment to our entire membership to hopefully make the regular season more relevant to more players.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask us in person or in response to this message.

 

Your TOPL Leadership Team

Mike, Chris and Adam