The Story of Table Tennis Ranking and Rating — and How We Measure Improvement

How good are you at table tennis? It sounds like a simple question.

If you are a professional player, there may be a world ranking beside your name. If you regularly enter tournaments, your national association may give you a rating or ranking. Club players may know roughly where they stand in their local league.

But what about everyone else? What rating should a beginner have? How do you compare a recreational player in London with one in Seoul? What if you train regularly but rarely—or never—enter tournaments? And if you have been practising for six months, how can you tell objectively whether you have improved?

Table tennis has been trying to measure playing ability for almost as long as international table tennis has existed.

In 2026, the sport is celebrating 100 years since the foundation of the International Table Tennis Federation and the first World Table Tennis Championships in London. The World Championships even returned to London for the centenary year.

Over that century, methods of measuring players have evolved enormously: from expert judgement, to world rankings, opponent-based ratings, tournament points and increasingly sophisticated statistical models.

Today, technology makes another form of measurement practical: standardised performance testing. To understand where that fits, we first need to understand what rankings and ratings were created to do.

Players at the early World Table Tennis Championships in London.

Ranking and rating are not the same

The terms ranking and rating are often used interchangeably, but there is an important distinction. A ranking primarily answers: Where do I stand compared with everyone else? If you are ranked 27th, there are 26 players ahead of you.

A rating tries to answer a slightly different question: How strong a player am I? A rating gives a numerical estimate of playing strength. Put everyone’s ratings in order and you can create a ranking, but the rating number itself is intended to tell us more than simply someone’s position on a list.

A player can improve without moving up a ranking if the people around them improve as well. Equally, a player’s ranking might rise because somebody else becomes inactive or loses expiring ranking points, even though the first player’s actual playing ability has not changed.

This tension between measuring achievement, estimating ability and tracking improvement runs through the history of table tennis ratings and rankings.

1926: international table tennis begins

The International Table Tennis Federation’s history records 1926 as the year in which the ITTF was initiated and the first World Championships were held in London.

One of the driving forces was Ivor Montagu, who became the ITTF’s first president and remained in the role for four decades. He was only 22 when the federation was founded.

Now that players from different countries were competing against one another, everyone wanted to know who the best players in the world were. By 1928, international table tennis had an answer.

The ITTF World Ranking archive reaches back to 1928. These original lists, unlike today’s computer-generated rankings, were essentially expert assessments, drawn up by leading figures including Ivor Montagu, Mrs Zoltán Mechlovits and Richard Pick.

While reasonable for a young international sport with relatively few international matches, it established the problem: How do you turn performances against different opponents, in different competitions, at different times, into a meaningful measure of a player’s level?

From opinion to numbers

As international sport expanded, subjective assessment became less satisfactory. More players competed. More tournaments were organised. Results accumulated. Meanwhile, another head-to-head game was developing a mathematical solution to a very similar problem.

Physicist and chess player Arpad Elo developed the rating approach that now bears his name. The US Chess Federation implemented Elo’s system in 1960, and the international chess federation FIDE adopted it in 1970.

It is based on the idea that a result tells us more when it is unexpected. An Elo-type system considers the actual result relative to the result that would have been expected from the players’ existing ratings. If a very strong player beats a much weaker player, we have learned little that we did not already expect. If the weaker player wins, we have learned something more.

That principle would become extremely influential in sports where competitors repeatedly meet one another—including table tennis.

The rise of table tennis player ratings

The United States became one of the best-known examples of a numerical table tennis rating culture. Research by statistician David J. Marcus notes that USA Table Tennis has operated a rating system since the 1970s. Although the formulas differ from chess Elo, the general concept of estimating player strength from competitive results is similar.

Rather than simply saying that two players are 15th and 60th on separate lists, a numerical rating attempts to express their estimated playing strength on the same scale.

Generations of American table tennis players have consequently become accustomed to describing their level with numbers such as 1200, 1800 or 2200. The system remains very much alive. USA Table Tennis maintains its player ratings, while it now also operates a separate ranking system based on performances at specified tournaments over a rolling period. USATT’s ranking rules currently use points earned at qualifying events over the preceding 24 months.

Even within one national governing body, rating a player’s playing strength and ranking their competitive achievements are useful enough to justify different systems.

The playing population gets much bigger

At the same time, international table tennis itself was becoming far broader than one elite World Championship. In 1982, the first World Veterans Championships were staged in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In 1988, six years later, table tennis made its Olympic debut in Seoul. The first Olympic table tennis competition featured 129 athletes representing 41 National Olympic Committees. Korea Republic’s Yoo Nam-kyu became the first men’s singles Olympic champion, while China’s Chen Jing won the inaugural women’s title. The ITTF’s history of table tennis at Seoul 1988 gives an excellent account of the event.

Men's team table tennis final at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Photo: Joel Solomon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

International pathways also developed for younger players. The first World Junior Championships were held in Santiago, Chile, in 2003. Among the teenagers who competed at that inaugural event were future Olympic and World champions including Ma Long, Zhang Jike and Li Xiaoxia.

In 2021, the format evolved again. The first World Youth Championships, staged in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, replaced the former World Junior Championships and introduced flagship U15 and U19 categories.

At the opposite end of the age spectrum, the former Veterans Championship has continued to grow dramatically. In 2024 it became the ITTF World Masters Championships, with Rome hosting what the ITTF describes as the largest table tennis event ever staged: 6,100 players aged from 40 to 99, representing 111 member associations. Para table tennis was included for the first time. ITTF World Masters Championships Rome 2024

That extraordinary range—from U15 players to competitors approaching 100 years old — is remarkable and very uncommon among competitive sports. It is genuinely a sport for a lifetime.

One of the many halls full of competitors at the 2024 ITTF World Masters Table Tennis Championships in Rome

Fastpong at the 2024 ITTF World Masters Table Tennis Championships in Rome.

Rating certainty and better mathematics

How certain are we about a player’s rating? Suppose one player has completed two hundred recent rated matches and another has only completed three. While we can give both players a number, we are not equally confident that both numbers accurately describe their playing strength.

In the late 1990s, statistician David J. Marcus developed a new table tennis rating system using Bayesian statistical principles. His research, published in The Statistician in 2001, was tested using data from 15,549 players and 330,079 matches. It was designed specifically for a changing table tennis population in which some players compete frequently, others rarely, and playing ability itself changes over time.

Instead of treating a player’s strength as one perfectly known number, a statistical model can say, in effect: This is our best estimate of the player’s strength—and this is how uncertain that estimate is.

Marcus’s work subsequently became the basis of Ratings Central, which has been providing table tennis ratings internationally since 2004. Ratings Central’s description of its Bayesian system explains how it handles players ranging from beginners to world champions.

This was another major step in the evolution of ratings: from simply counting results to estimating the underlying playing ability that might have produced them.

Germany’s TTR: one common scale

In Germany, the Tischtennis-Rating, usually abbreviated to TTR, provides a numerical measure of playing strength across an enormous national competitive population.

The current German TTR system documentation explains that male and female players of all age groups are included within one rating framework. Results from official competitions alter a player’s TTR according to factors including the strength of their opponents and their results. The methodology explicitly draws heavily on the Elo concept.

While players may compete in different regions, age groups, leagues and divisions, a shared rating system gives them a common language for discussing playing strength.

Why the ITTF moved in a different direction

With the increasingly sophisticated methods available for estimating playing strength, it might seem logical that the international World Ranking would become more and more like a pure rating system.

However, on 1 January 2018, a fundamentally different World Ranking scheme came into effect. The previous system was based substantially on results against opponents: win and a player could gain points; lose and they could lose points.

Under the new approach, the fundamental principle became the round reached in a tournament. Ranking points were attached to event categories and finishing positions. A player would no longer directly lose ranking points simply for losing to a lower-ranked opponent. The ITTF’s original 2018 ranking-system announcement explains the change in detail.

The motivation of the governing body was to move beyond simply estimating playing strength. A world ranking also needs to determine entries and seedings, reward achievement at major events, encourage participation on the international circuit and provide an understandable competitive narrative for players, spectators, broadcasters and sponsors.

The ITTF explicitly stated that encouraging the world’s leading players to compete regularly at its international events was one of the objectives of the change.

There is no single perfect system, because different systems are designed to answer different questions.

Who did you beat?

Competition-based ratings are extremely useful. Ultimately, competitive table tennis is about playing opponents and winning matches. But there can be a problem if you only ask who did you beat.

There are millions of table tennis players who are not serious tournament competitors. Consider someone who has just started playing, enjoying the sport. They might practise every week and even take lessons at a club or play at school, but they have never entered a sanctioned competition. They probably do not have a rating—and they are far from alone.

Consider a good recreational player who has played for 15 years but has little interest in organised competition. Or a promising school player whom a coach sees for the first time. Or somebody living in a country whose domestic rating system uses a completely different scale from the system in another country.

Competition ratings cannot easily compare these players because there is no connected history of rated match results from which their playing strength can be inferred. That is not a flaw in those systems. It simply isn’t the problem they were designed to solve.

Can we measure what the player actually does?

Modern technology gives us another way to approach the question. Instead of asking only: Who can you beat? we can also ask: What can you do?

• Can you return a standardised ball accurately?
• How fast can you return it?
• Can you maintain that accuracy as the exercise becomes more difficult?
• Can you perform accurately when ball placement and the demands of the exercise change?
• If you take the same assessment again several months later, has your measurable performance improved?

Other sports routinely use this sort of benchmark. A runner does not need to enter a race to discover whether their 5 km time has improved. A weightlifter does not need to beat another weightlifter before discovering that they can now lift more.

Historically, however, objective and repeatable measurement of training performance has been difficult in table tennis. A person feeding balls manually cannot reproduce every ball exactly, and measuring where each return lands and how fast it travels would be extremely difficult and laborious. New automated ball delivery, connected sensors and software have now changed what is practical.

A different kind of table tennis rating

This is where the Fastpong Rating & Ranking system fits. It is not intended to replace the ITTF World Ranking, USATT ratings, Germany’s TTR, Ratings Central or any other established competition system. Those systems measure competitive achievement or estimate strength from results against other players.

Fastpong instead measures performance under a standardised table tennis assessment. The rating test uses a sequence of exercises in which both return accuracy and return speed contribute to the player’s score. The rating is divided into three broad levels:

• Beginner: 0–1000
• Intermediate: 1001–2000
• Advanced: 2001–3000

Players begin with the easier Beginner assessment. Sufficient performance unlocks the more demanding Intermediate test and, eventually, the Advanced assessment. The exercises become progressively more difficult as the player advances.

A beginner does not need to attempt an assessment designed around the capabilities of an elite player, while an advanced player cannot achieve a high rating simply by repeatedly performing easy beginner exercises.

The rating test is deliberately simpler than the training analytics

It is important not to confuse the Fastpong rating test with Fastpong’s full performance-analysis system. The rating test asks: What is my current standardised benchmark? It gives the player a deliberately concise result:

• rating / score
• average speed
• average accuracy

No useful rating system should pretend that one number—or even a few numbers—can completely describe a player.

The detailed analysis comes during normal Fastpong training. The training statistics and performance analysis help answer: What am I good at? What am I struggling with? And how is my performance changing? There, the system can record and display information including speed, accuracy, forehand and backhand results, landing positions and heatmaps, historical results and performance across different periods. The Fastpong statistics tutorial and Fastpong mobile-app overview describe these broader performance-analysis tools.

A rating that starts with the beginner

Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is not mathematical—it is who can obtain a rating. Most competition-based table tennis ratings begin when somebody becomes a competition player. Fastpong is designed to start much earlier.

A beginner who has never played a tournament can take the test. So can someone who plays recreationally and has no interest in entering competitions. So can a developing club player. And so can an advanced or professional player, creating a potential continuum:

Beginner → recreational player → developing player → club competitor → advanced player → professional

The player does not need to spend months or years building a tournament history before receiving their first benchmark. For somebody just beginning table tennis, that can be particularly useful. They may not yet care whether they are ranked 3,000th or 30,000th in a competitive population. But they can understand:

Last time I scored 420. Now I scored 510.

That gives improvement a tangible value from the very beginning of the player’s journey.

A possible tool for talent identification

A standardised assessment can also be useful to coaches, schools and federations. Imagine assessing 100 young beginners. None has a competition rating; some may never have received formal table tennis coaching. How do you quickly find the players who deserve a closer look?

Experienced coaches are extremely good at spotting movement, coordination, technique and potential. No numerical test should attempt to replace that judgement, but measurements can provide another signal.

If every student undertakes the same progressive assessment, a coach can quickly identify players producing unusual combinations of accuracy, speed and the ability to succeed as the exercises become more difficult. A beginner who does not yet look like a polished table tennis player might nevertheless produce exceptional measurable results. Serve and receive, movement, tactical awareness, anticipation, psychology, match intelligence and many other qualities matter enormously, but a standardised test can say: This person deserves another look.That makes a rating potentially useful not only for measuring established players, but also for initial talent screening.

Towards a globally comparable standardised assessment

National systems such as USATT ratings and Germany’s TTR are extremely valuable within their own competitive ecosystems, but their numbers are not directly interchangeable. A USATT 1800 is not simply equivalent to a German TTR of 1800, an English rating of 1800 or another country’s rating using the same-looking number. The player populations, match networks and calculations are different.

A standardised physical assessment offers another possibility. If players in different countries use the same test protocol, equipment, exercises and scoring system, their results can be placed on one common assessment scale without requiring a conversion between national tournament-rating systems. A player in Korea, England, Germany, India, Japan or the United States can perform the same assessment under standardised conditions.

The Fastpong app already combines its rating tests with worldwide ranking functionality. Again, this should not be confused with the ITTF World Ranking. The two rankings answer different questions. The ITTF World Ranking reflects achievement in international competition. The Fastpong ranking compares results from a standardised performance assessment.

Fastpong global ranking showing player score, accuracy, speed and country

One number will never completely describe a table tennis player

Two players with exactly the same rating can be very different. One may have a devastating forehand and a weak backhand. Another may lack outright speed but almost never miss. One may have exceptional serves. Another may excel in rallies but struggle with receive. One may perform brilliantly in controlled training and struggle psychologically in competition. Another may be the opposite. That is why these different systems should not be treated as rivals.

A world or national ranking can measure competitive position and achievement. An opponent-based rating can estimate competitive playing strength. A standardised assessment can measure performance under repeatable conditions. Training analytics can show where and how that performance is changing. And an experienced coach can interpret all of those numbers in the context of the actual player.

A century of table tennis ratings, rankings and measurement

One hundred years of trying to answer a simple question

International table tennis began its organised journey in 1926. The first world rankings followed in 1928. Since then, the sport has travelled an extraordinary distance.

World Championships established the summit of international competition. Numerical ratings made it possible to estimate competitive strength. Veterans—and now Masters—competition demonstrated that serious international table tennis can continue across a lifetime.

Table tennis became an Olympic sport in Seoul in 1988. Junior and later Youth World Championships created international pathways for the next generation. Statistical models became sophisticated enough to represent not just estimated ability, but our uncertainty about that estimate.

The ITTF World Ranking evolved from an opponent-based approach into a system focused much more heavily on achievement at international events. And now connected training equipment makes it possible to measure elements of performance directly and repeatably, even for players who have never entered a tournament.

One hundred years into international table tennis—and 98 years after those first world rankings—we still do not have one perfect number that describes a table tennis player. We probably never will.

Instead, we have become better at recognising that there are several different questions worth answering:

• Where do I rank?
• Who can I beat?
• What can I do?
• Am I getting better?

The history of table tennis ratings and rankings is really the history of our attempts to answer those questions. After a century of international table tennis, we are still finding new ways to measure them.