Here is my take as to why the ratings are so high.
1) We had 3 players with 1000 plus ratings out of the 10 open players.
2) There were no Sandbaggers in the Adv. field, they had 0 people with ratings.
3) There were only 2 people with ratings other then Open or Masters players.
In the Open field. 5 people shot better then their rating both rounds. 2 had one round lowere then their rating. 1 person had both rounds below his rating.
In the Masters field. 1 person shot better then their rating both rounds (2 is much better then a 925 rated player) The other 6 rated players had atleast 1 round below their rating.
Sarah had both rounds better then her rating.
Tommy Thompson had both rounds better then his rating.
I think that these ratings will come down a little, but not a huge amount.
Though I can't say I understand the rating system completely, after reading through what material that has been posted I notice one thing that I'm sure has been discussed as a problem at some point.
The round ratings reflect the player ratings. The total amount of round rating points everyone shoots better than their total ratings are equal to the total amount of round rating points the field shoots below their rating. Is it correct that the unofficial round ratings are based on the SSA, but not the official? I suppose I'm guessing, but I'm just trying to make sense out of pieces of info. that I've read.
Likewise, when one player's rating goes up, that means another player's rating is going down. The total amount of points in the system seems to remain constant.
While this might make for easy math, it doesn't take into account... 1) that the whole field may shoot good or bad in general. This is, of course, always true to some degree or another. 2) Player ratings were mean to reflect a person's ability as compared to a world class par. This 1000 number is losing it's significance as compared to how good your score is for the course. Instead all these numbers are relative to how well the field is shooting during the past few months.
Does this make sense or am I off here? There is tons of wasted babble on the PDGA forum about ratings and everything else. It's hardly worth the time to try and find something relative to this particular question about the rating system, but I think it's important.
