Backboard is a tool for making pinball player data from IFPA more useful. The International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA) tracks results from sanctioned pinball tournaments the world over and uses them to build rankings for regional, national, and international championship tournaments. The final standings in each tournament are factored into algorithms to determine a player's rating. Competing in tournaments also awards points by which championship rankings are determined.
The collected results for each player are made available on the IFPA website (example), but the presentation and clarity leaves something to be desired. While all the relevant information is present- it's not easy to interpret trends in your metrics and the summary statistics provided are minimal.
Backboard makes this data more useful by showing graphs of a players rating and ranking history over time, providing additional summary statistics, and evaluating tournament-level performance with a new Performance Score.
A player's performance in a tournament is, ultimately, just the player's place/position at the end of play. This is used for point allocation and rating adjustments. However the skill levels of the players in a tournament can vary widely and it's difficult to gauge one's own performance relative to the other players' skill level.
The Performance Score presented here indicates how much better (or worse) a player's position in the tournament was compared to predicted performance. IFPA ratings are based on a modified version of the Glicko rating system and intended to indicate the predicted outcome in a match. Thus, in theory, the outcome of a tournament should be identical to a list of player rankings from highest to lowest. The Performance Score is the difference between this predicted standing and the actual one.
For example, if a player has the 10th highest rating in a tournament, but ends up in 4th Place, their Performance Score would be 6. If a player had the 4th highest rating but ended up in 10th place, their performance score would be -6.
Tournament results and player data are retrieved from the IFPA's API and collected into a PostgreSQL database hosted on DigitalOcean. Queries of this database are used to draw graphs with Plotly. This site was created with the Shiny framework and is hosted on shinyapps.io.