About Tennis Elo Ratings
This website visualizes historical men's tennis player performance using the Elo rating system, a method originally developed for chess rankings but now widely used across many competitive sports and games.
What is the Elo Rating System?
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games. After every match, the winning player takes points from the losing player. The number of points exchanged depends on the relative ratings of the players - beating a higher-rated player results in a larger rating increase than beating a lower-rated player.
Key features of Elo ratings:
- Ratings typically range from around 1500 to 2400+ for professional players
- A difference of 100 points suggests the higher-rated player has roughly a 64% chance of winning
- Ratings adjust dynamically after each match, reflecting recent performance
- The system accounts for the quality of opposition, not just win/loss records
Why Use Elo for Tennis?
- They consider the strength of opponents, not just match results
- They adjust quickly to changes in player form
- They provide an objective measure of player skill over time
- They can predict match win probabilities
- They work well for comparing players across different eras
About Our Ratings
Our Elo ratings are calculated using match data from men's ATP Tour-level tournaments only. Unlike Tennis Abstract's elo, we do not include Challenger events.
Data Coverage
The ratings currently include men's ATP Tour matches up to the end of 2024. The data is sourced from Jeff Sackmann's tennis databases, which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The implementation details of our Elo rating calculations can be examined in the source code here: GitHub Repository