The object of the tournament was to qualify for your Zone, then finish in the top three in your Zone, then do as well as possible in your Final Group. Those were the targets, and the ratings are not supposed to replace the final positions in the tournament. The ratings aim to give a better overall perspective on the relative strengths of players over a longer timescale.
Some of the rating positions are not the same as the final tournament positions for the following good reasons:
a) Some people had very good results against people who ended up in the opposite Final Group
to them. These results are given full weighting in the ratings, of course, but were obviously not included in the scores within each Final Group where only games against other qualifiers were counted.
b) The results of both Final Groups implied that (on that weekend, at least) the Pacific Zone
was stronger than the Atlantic Zone, so a given TP score in the Pacific Zone should be rated
slightly higher than the same TP score in the Pacific Zone.
Jason's move above Zenon is mainly due to a), and his move above Jérôme mainly due to b), but partly due to a) as well. In fact, these three players all ended up with very similar ratings - Zenon's implies he would be expected to score 51 % of the TPs against Jérôme's 49 % and 48 % against Jason's 52 %, which are tiny differences.
Julia's move up above Tessa & Peter is due to a)
Dave's move up above Laszlo is due to both a) (eg. Dave beat Alex in the Pacific Zone) and b)
Britta's move up above Sandrine & Steven occurred because not only was she in the "stronger" Pacific Zone, she actually scored more TPs to come 4th in that Zone than Steven did to come 3rd in the Atlantic Zone. Britta also did very well in her Final Group so the rating-increasing effect of her TP total was high enough to more or less cancel out the rating-reducing effect of the lower average rating of her opponents in that Group.
The inclusion of qualifying matches did not have very much effect on the positions at all. The reason for that is that the non-qualifiers' ratings are (obviously) based solely on rating of the person who beat them (which takes into account all of their results in the main tournament) and on the score in the qualifying games against that person. This means that the qualifier's rating is hardly affected - if this doesn't make total sense, it should do if you read the full description of the method. :-) Pepe & didi's ratings were slightly affected because in this case both ended up playing in the main tournament as well.
Further information:
The following links contain even more information - the less technical notes are starred:
The date and time are :
Friday, 16-May-2008 14:06:54 GMT
Friday, 16-May-2008 15:06:54 BST (local)
This file was last modified on Monday, 10-Mar-2003 20:03:28 GMT