Rankings - Tournament Attendance Effect

I spent a couple of minutes this morning on Rankings HQ and it got me thinking about rankings.  Specifically what do they actually tell you?  A vocal friend of mine commented to me that rankings tell you who went to the most tournaments, not who the best player is.  Strangely enough, there may be a Nugget of Knowledge ^tm in there.  Or maybe not when I consider the source.  J

 

Rankings HQ uses the best 3 tournament scores over the last 12 months to calculate player rankings.  So you would need to attend a minimum of 3 tournaments a year to put yourself on equal footing.  Every extra tournament you attend could further improve your ranking by allowing yourself to eliminate a poor showing or use a good finish based on an excellent set of match ups.  If you look at the current rankings you would have to drop all the way down to 17^th place before you found a player with only 3 tournaments.  However, you can also find a plethora of players buried in the rankings that have a large number of tournaments under their belts. My take away from this is that attending more tournaments can potentially improve your ranking, but you still have to be a good player to capitalize on it.  At the end of the day the best players are the best players because of the extra time spent on their craft, which includes attending more tournaments. 

 

Consider this a down payment on a longer discussion on rankings I'm hoping to continue in the future.  I would like to look at things like the subjective nature of soft scores, match ups and a few other things along the way.