EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KUVmCHM.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cIzVc9b.jpg)
Events added: TLC 7 - 10, German Nation Wars, Nation War Week 1 - 3, Defiler 72, Defiler Special
In the past six months, shortly before the TLCs rebooted foreign tournaments, the Elo Ratings were a bit fluctuating. Several players went up by a lot, others faced a rapid downfall. For instance Peruvian
Terror droped from a near-Top 10 rank down to the middle field, while ex-Templar Naugrim went up. By now the points started to get somewhat stable. The leadership is taken by
trutaCz - at least when the Teamliquid events are considered. However, in terms of absolute points Gargoyle remains "unbeaten". The Terran only partook in the Defiler Special events and the Nation Wars; in those his biggest rivals were other Russian speakers, such as Lancer, Flisk and most notably Djem5. It's still very hard to say whether or not the Terran could maintain his top position if he was to face the top notch foreigners more frequently, e.g. by playing in the TLCs, or meeting them in other (long) Best of Distances. Anyhow, back to the point distribution. It seems that the second half of this year introduced three "new" top playesr to the field: Djem5, vOddy and - for now - Naugrim. Every other player could be found in the high 1300 ranks at least once... not this trio. Naugrim just left the area of less than 30 games and is slowly making his way up. vOddy and Djem5, mostly due to their results in the most recent tournaments, cemented their position.
Other notable re-entries were dsaqwe and dRaW, who returned from a tournament inactivity in the past two months. In contrast to other players, such as
Ramms, they apparently did not lose momentum. Actually dRaW reached a peak Elo number after placing second in the Defiler Tournament, temporarily surpassing the 1400 line. Now for some explanations. As can be seen in Gargoyle's case, some of the ranking might be skewed. Similar to Gargoyle, werdum only participated in Russian events. As a consequence, he mostly faced the same players again and again. It seems as if his skill is slightly biased - he just might have ~50 points more than usual. The data hints that this represents some momentary high.
Other than that, a couple of inactive top players retunred and lost points. Their current ranking might not be resembled by their current Elo. Michael for instance lost a few points in the last Defiler tournament, but defeated a number of good players. Other examples would be Ramms, ZZZero and Southpark. They most definitely are not too close to their old form - yet.
The circles
It seems we start to get a picture. Players ranked with more than 1350 points are usually found among the last eight in any given tournament. Our leading circle would thus be:
1. trutaCz
2. Marwin
3. dRaW
4. Djem5
5. eOnzErG
Close but no cigar would be dsaqwe and vOddy. If vOddy has a good day, he might beat any of the other players of the Top 5. dsaqwe seems similar, but also has the higher variance in points. Anything is possible.
After those seven players, the ones with more than 1220 points are usually kick anyone below quite convincingly, if the distance is better than the TLC standard of Bo1. Players in that area are:
werdum, Bakuryu, Julia, flisk, Dandy, Naugrim, Lancerx, Tama, Dragon and funNy
Others listed in the table (but not in this topic) had too little games to give some statement. A notable case is the Lithuanian ytOng, who is about to get ranked. He rarely plays in events, if he does, he uses a smurf. He can mostly be found in Defiler Tours and/or ICCup ranking tournaments. However, he beats top class players (Elo 1150++) with a ~60% win ratio.
Anyone in between 1100 and 1220 points isn't really an event favourite. However, if those play the ordinary ladder players with (old ICCup) ranks of B- and lower, they're clear favourites. Please note how even strong players like KogeT, sas.non and Radley are just slightly better than 1100. This doesn't mean they're bad, it just means they're not stable enough (win ratio of 66% and better) against the top circle players.
Interesting Players / Trends
The "Anything can happen" award goes to eOnzErG. He managed to drop to a 1200 rating and climb back to 1400 in just six events. His ratio goes up and down, pure chaos - hence the "fifth" place in the circle thing. In reality he is third after Gargoyle and trutaCz. However, I have doubts that he maintains that, he could as well plummet or lead the next month.
The best newcomers are Naugrim and remag. Naugrim started to beat good players regularly and seems to not really have a "weak" match up. remag on the other hand can literally beat anyone, but Protoss. Knowing him from the German team, this is no big surprise - he loathes the match up. Whoops, there goes another secret.
The biggest fall by now is Julia. Despite his furious comments about how everything is to blame but himself, he started to lose points - a lot even. He fell from 1430 points down to less than 1300.
