Player ID and ranking systems

[Juha Luostarinen]

Hello all

Here is just some thoughts I have.

Global Player IDs:

In my plan The World of Contract Bridge (WCB) - you all should have the link to my plan, if not, please ask - I have thought this matter. I think it could be in form like

1. First comes the nationality like FIN, POL, GER, ENG.. If Bridge Mates can't handle alphabets, then we could give then with 3 numbers.
2. Then club number as many they must. I don't know how the countries give the numbers, but believe they could generate at the same 4 digit form.
   
3. And last comes player number with 1.000.000 or 100.000. Maybe countries have to generate player numbers too? France have over 100.000 players, so 999.999 players should be enough for all countries.

Like my number would be FINxxx001009.

1. If a NBO needs help to convert their numbers, we could have a help -group for that.
2. Old data should convert as the new player number needs. This is an easy task, and I believe NBOs has ways to do it.
   

I also suggest a player pass for everyone. It would be easy to read to the system. If there is one manufacturer for all, I believe pass wouldn't cost too much.

Master points and ranking

This would be a hard task. As we all know, NBO's have their own way to do it. Now we need their help to resolve this problem. We must look at WBF's ranking, if they have a reasonable ranking system, and ask NBOs to convert their rankings like WBF's or maybe, just maybe, we could help them to organize a conversation group to plan

1. how get results data for their ranking system
   
2. And how to get their rankings to WBF's.

Easiest would be if all NBOs have the ranking system, but it would take a long period to handle.

We have to create a versatile ranking system for all NBOs to accept. And then convert old data. And here we have to get close contacts to all.

What to do next

1. Our group should have an organizer, project manager, who kicks us all to work and gives us all the tasks our group need. Who?
2. We should contact all NBOs to discuss of different possibilities. Ask their way to handle rankings.
3. We have to have a proper system to communicate. I believe Kiat and Christine has something in their mind.

Have fun

Juha Luostarinen

[Marcin Wasłowicz]

I understand that 3 letter codes are better for visual association however it would seem that due to the popularity of the internet perhaps 2 letter codes would do the job better. I see a lot of arguments for both sides (including the fact that the international olympic committee uses 3 letters). With two letters ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 seems the best choice, with three letters there a choice between IOC and  ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 .

There is one more problem with letters - they will look nice for latin alphabet users but might be difficult in places with different alphabets like China or Japan. This is assuming that the Global ID is to be used locally not only for international tournaments.

A completely different question is whether the IDs should be divided by countries to begin with. I don't think that the answer is obvious. Sure it's slightly inconvenient but I think it's fair to assume that the Internet will keep working and it's easy to make a service which gives IDs (even random!) over API. It can actually even assign "blocks" of IDs per country and when the country runs out they get a new set. Most of european NBOs are smaller than 1000 players. This means dozens of millions of IDs saved in Europe alone. This will make the ID shorter.

It seems very weird for me to include a club number in the code. People change clubs. They shouldn't change ID. If the ID stays the same - what's the point in having the club there?

(assuming there are no clubs in the ID) I think that ACBL is the biggest and they have ~165,000 active members. I'm not sure how many inactive players (used IDs) they have or rather how many new players yearly they register. In Poland we have ~6,600 players however our database is over 3 times that big (19,300) and we register up to 1,000 new players per year (most of them obviously quickly become inactive). If those proportions were the same for ACBL (very unlikely) that would mean that ACBL has already 482,500 used IDs and they "consume" 25,000 IDs yearly. So assuming that Polish dynamic translates to ACBL (unlikely) and those values remain stable for years (highly unlikely) and that my math is correct (although naïve)  they'd run out of the new IDs just before the Global Player ID would be old enough to buy beer on the US soil. 

That's not including the fact that not all IDs might not be used for various reasons.

I don't see a reason for a physical player pass unless it contains QR code or RFID to be scanned by something (in Poland we have RFID player ID cards which allow for printing score recaps at printing stations, WBF&EBL uses badges with barcodes for the same purpose). Anyhow, those passes should be arranged by NBOs not globally.

The ID you proposed is 12 characters long. Most IDs this long have a couple of extra digits as a control sum, although obviously those typically used for more important things like credit card numbers or bank accounts. Nevertheless, I think it's work consideration.

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Pozdrawiam,

Marcin Wasłowicz

[Marcin Wasłowicz]

I just realised that players change countries too.

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Pozdrawiam,

Marcin Wasłowicz

[Juha Luostarinen]

And they change clubs too. :-)

[Shen Ting Ang]

My thoughts:

• Bridgemates only accept numbers (refer to the other thread)
• China easily has millions of players - 6 digits would not be enough; 8 might be safe, 9 should be sufficient. This would also give individual countries some scope to use the digits in the way they prefer (e.g. county for EBU, province for China, or clubs as previously discussed.)
• Keeping the same ID with country code would allow for foreign players to enter their IDs into bridgemates etc. without any possibility of collisions (if you remove country prefix/code), or organizers having to find a way to handle foreign participants. 
• Either a player keeps the country code he first started with (and similarly for clubs/county if so designed), or there needs to be a separate table/database to keep track of country moves (more complicated/unnecessary IMO)
• Checksums are a good idea, could be an extra alphabet which does not need to be entered into the bridgemates, but could be used to verify when needed.

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[Mark Guthrie]

Hi Juha and everyone,

Apologies for being no good with all of this collaboration technology, I'll pick it up I promise!

My thoughts on this:

* There is some great communication and we should be able to come up with something that works - great start!

* We should set low targets first - no country is going to give up on their numbering system and adopt something else any time soon

* What we need is a mapping from country id to international id (and then back to another country id)

* I think we have lost if we make the country name somehow part of the global identifier, it should be properly international and one of the things you can get once you have someone's global identifier is all of their country ids. e.g. I am 123456 in Australia. You look me up in the global directory and find my global id is 45678. Now you can find that I am also ABCDEF in the EBU and WXYZ in the ACBL. And maybe QWERTY on BBO and AAAAA on Real Bridge. If I move countries then the country shouldn't follow me. I don't like being AU-123456 because I first register in Australia.

* I don't think bridgemates matter for this - they are a problem for each country to solve (which they have done already).

* Checksums are a good idea, one character is enough though.

Maybe I am not setting as high a goal as some of you but I think if we got to a point where we had a simple translation database that could take someone in one country and map them to the same person in another country then we would have achieved a lot. Someone in each country could be responsible for uploading their own data, I think the hard part is keeping it clean and working out who is a duplicate and who is a new person. I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of that. In Australia we already have duplicate players and that is only one country. I am sure this problem exists elsewhere.

Thinking ahead, how nice would it be as a new player in Italy to be told you are registered as DFGHJ in Italy and your international number (for when you play globally) is 12345678. That would be quite something.

(And no, I don't want to be Juha's suggested project manager!)

cheers

Mark

[Kiat Huang]

The idea to obviously retain the existing NBO Player ID systems, but for every player also assign a Global Player ID, I think makes sense to most people on this subGroup.  Each player will have two IDs, their NBO ID and a unique Global ID. 

Can we agree on this as a first consensual decision?   And if not, what is a better alternative?

Once we agree, we can work on the details, the implementation of it.

I've transfered some ideas down to a document in the Global Players IDs doc space - https://docs.google.com/document/d/19F4oF85cAW1vHeyKp9pRiLCWdEwnAVRg9TXSH7aAwgw/edit?userstoinvite=wpo...@gmail.com&ts=5fac6bc4#heading=h.wnyzo31shgfk

Everyone who is a member of this group has editor access to this drive area, including this doc.

Incidentally, the GPOs could be extended to partnerships and teams too.

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Kind regards,

Kiat

linkedin.com/in/kiathuang

bit.ly/bridge-hackathon

bswg.org

www.ebu.co.uk/biographies/kiat-huang

+44-7526-810553

[Gonzalo Goded]

I believe each player should have a Global ID and 0..N NBO Ids, and he can even have various IDs on same NBO if we are considering BBO as an NBO. 

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/a/bswg.org/d/msgid/player-ids/CAPX0S3iuWs1q%3DF2NVfKU0N5aMUWCnUP8HVKo5nwnYgU%2BZrd%3DMQ%40mail.gmail.com.