The BirdieFire Ranking is a ‘Points Accumulation’ Ranking based solely on Tournament Results and is 100% objective.

BirdieFire's servers recalculate the ranking every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning automatically, to give you the most up-to-date and objective ranking available.

How it Works
Every "Team vs Team" Match within a tournament has a 'Points Pot'.  Each team brings their ‘Match Value’ number of points to that match's 'Points Pot'.  Each team's 'Match Value' is based on their ranking going into that tournament; higher ranked teams bring more points.

In this ranking you are rewarded for Winning and Stroke Differential, period.  The magic number is 6 strokes per round.  For example, in a 3 round event if you beat an opponent by an average of 6 strokes a round or 18 strokes for the tournament you take home all the points and they get none.  It’s as simple as that.

For ties and non-complete victories the Points Pot is split up based on the percentage of a complete victory.  If you don’t have a complete victory the highest percentage of points you can win is 70% of the Points Pot.

Additional Notes & Caveats

The BirdieFire Ranking in the beginning of the season fluctuates more than a 'traditional' ranking as teams begin to settle into position.  This can be both a good and bad thing for teams, but if you will look at the Rankings' past track record you will find that when its time for a ranking to matter, at the end of the season, the BirdieFire Ranking is on target.

The match points won are discounted if the ranking difference with the opponent is high enough.  This is based on the ‘Field Spread’.  The ‘Field Spread’ is a number determined to be the distance of ranking spots in which the high team should win by complete victory more than 50% of the time.  For Women this is 50 ranking positions and Men it is 60.

• Wins over teams ½ the Field Spread to the full Field Spread away have a points discount of 15% (25-49 spots for women and 30-59 spots for men)
• Wins over teams equal the Field Spread to 1.5 * Field Spread away are discounted 30% (50-74 spots for women and 60-89 spots for men)
• Wins over teams greater than 1.5 * the Field Spread are discounted 50% (75+ spots for women and 90+ spots for men)

Each team's 'Match Value' is based on a 3 Round Tournament.  If you play less than or more than 3 rounds the Match Value is factored accordingly.  For example, in a 2 round tournament the Match Value for each team is 2/3 the value displayed on the Ranking Page and if its a 4 round tournament is 4/3 the Match Value.

A Team's Ranking at the end of a season is their initial Ranking for the next season.  A Team carries their initial 'Match Value' into their first two tournaments regardless of how their Ranking has changed.  After the third Ranking period if a team has not competed in a tournament that team is dropped from the rankings until they compete in a tournament.

What’s not include

• “Additional Components” – There are no additional ‘Strength of Schedule’ , ‘Stroke Differential’, ‘Head to Head’, etc components that are factored together to come up with the BirdieFire Ranking.  All of that is built-in to the points system.  Its about playing tournament rounds and winning match-ups.  You get more points for beating better teams and more points for how much you beat them.  Simple!
• ‘Re-evaluation based on Ranking Changes’ – There is no ‘re-evaluation’ of Win Values here.  With the BirdieFire Rankings if you beat the #2 team in the Fall and they slip in the Spring, you still get credit for beating the #2 team.  Simple!   Re-evaluation to us means 'we don't trust the ranking we gave them so lets average it out with re-evaluation'.
• Human intervention required to "run the rankings" – Our software automatically gathers results from numerous sources and uses a defined formula to build the rankings.  No humans needed.