Because of personal circumstances, I will only be able to post French Open predictions based on my ELO rankings up to the 28th of May. If I can return before the end of the tournament, I will try to post predictions for matches not yet played but I cannot guarantee this. (Update: I'm skipping these posts altogether for this tournament, sorry!)
That's the bad news out of the way, the rest of my news is just below the jump.
I plan on changing how I determine who should appear in my weekly rankings. Since around this time last year, I've been collecting data on how many ATP/WTA tournaments and matches each player has played, and using this to determine if they are ranked by me or not. I won't be changing the threshold (currently at 5 tournaments or 8 matches), but I will be applying a formula to adjust this data, to remove inactive players.
Last year, both the Men and the Women played in up to 37 tournaments, and the 128th most active player took part in 7 of them (playing 10 matches for the Men and 12 for the Women). Thus, every update, every player will lose 2/37 of a tournament and 3/37 of a match. This means that to get on the rankings, you need 5 tournaments or 8 matches, but to stay on for a year, you need 7 tournaments or 11 matches.
As a small buffer to limit the immediate impact of this change, every player will gain half a tournament and half a match for free.
I hope this update helps improve the rankings list, by preventing inactive players from staying on the list. I will continue removing manually retired players from the list at the following Grand Slam, and thus I will be removing Lleyton Hewitt and Maria Sharapova in a few week's time.
If you have any idea to improve my blog, or my rankings, feel free to leave a comment below.
