Thursday, October 28, 2010

USCL Power Rankings: Final Week

The final week of the United States Chess League regular season has come and gone, and the playoffs are set. The power rankings only are for the regular season, so the rankings below are the final ones for this year.

The last week really shook up the rankings, with St. Louis plummeting four places and other teams jockeying for a better position. In the end, the newcomers, the New England Nor'easters are far above the remainder of the field. Interestingly the bottom three places of the rankings are filled by Eastern Division Teams.

Before the 2010 list, let's look at where teams stood in the 2009 list.

Power Rankings 2009 (End of Regular Season)
1 - New Jersey (8.0 - 1st East)
1.000
2 - Seattle (7.5 - 1st West)
0.953
3 - Boston (7.5 - 2nd East)
0.929
4 - Arizona (6.0 - 3rd West)
0.901
5 - San Francisco (6.5 - 2nd West)
0.894
6 - Miami (6.0 - 4th West)
0.879
7 - New York (5.0 - 3rd East)
0.853
8 - Chicago (4.0 - 5th West)
0.764
9 - Philadelphia (4.0 - 5th East)
0.735
10 - Dallas (3.5 - 6th West)
0.730
11 - Queens (3.5 - 6th East)
0.726
12 - Baltimore (4.5 - 4th East)
0.724
13 - Tennessee (2.0 - 7th West)
0.647
14 - Carolina (2.0 - 7th East)
0.622

How some teams fortunes have changed in a year, especially New Jersey which went from the top in 2009 to near the bottom this year.

Therefore, here is the final power rankings for the 2010 season.

2010 USCL Power Rankings
End of Regular Season


Rank Team Score Change
1 - New England 1.000 0
2 - Boston 0.886 +1
3 - Arizona 0.857 -1
4 - Chicago 0.793 +2
5 - New York 0.793 -1
6 - Baltimore 0.787 +1
7 - Miami 0.771 +1
8 - Seattle 0.760 +2
9 - St. Louis 0.743 -4
10 - Los Angeles 0.740 +3
11 - San Francisco 0.708 -2
12 - Philadelphia 0.697 +2
13 - Dallas 0.686 -2
14 - New Jersey 0.677 -2
15 - Manhattan 0.638 0
16 - Carolina 0.607 0

The top eight teams in the power rankings are also the top eight teams in the playoffs. Good luck to all of them.

1 comment:

Ilya said...

Ok its obvious to me that the rankings are incorrect. The bottom 3 teams in the whole league both by statistics and by your rankins are NJ Man and Carolina in descending order of strength. That makes one thing clear the west overall is is stronger and most importantly more competetive. I wonder how can a team like Chicago which is 2nd in the much more competetive West be tied with 4th place NY in the much less competitive East. You put NE in the west and I'm not sure they score better than Arizona and same can be said about Boston and other Eastern teams.