NIJMEGEN - And here are the new rankings!

MCR (Mahjong Competition Rules) Ranking:

1. Eveline Broers, the Netherlands
2. Jesper Willemoes Hansen, Denmark
3. Bo Lang, Switzerland

Riichi Ranking:

1. Jaap Croeze, the Netherlands
2. Marianne Croeze, the Netherlands
3. Martin Rep, the Netherlands (I swear I did not know this when I started this discussion!)

No, these are not the new official EMA Rankings. The European Mahjong Association is in the process of developing a new ranking system, and they are doing that quite thoroughly. But, in the meantime, Mahjong News has decided to use a new ranking instead (or next to) the formal EMA ranking.
The rankings Mahjong News has chosen for, are the ones which have been kept by Austrian mahjong player Alexander Doppelhofer for some years. Mahjong News has published before his yearly MCR (2008 and 2009) and Riichi rankings (2009). Exclusively for Mahjong News, Alexander will recalculate the ranking after each MERS tournament.
This is no depreciation of the outstanding work which Sébastien Berret, the ‘ranking master of EMA’, is doing. But now that it has become clear that not only Mahjong News, not only quite some players but also EMA itself is not so happy anymore with the current system (like I wrote in my column Luca! Luca! Luca!), we want to present a ranking which gives a real good insight in the achievements of tournament players in the current year.

You will find the sortable Mahjong News rankings here:
MCR Ranking
Riichi Ranking

But you can also find the current rankings when you scroll down.

Backgrounds

For his ranking, Alexander Doppelhofer uses the results of the last six MERS tournaments, e.g. with the values 100+200+300+400+500+600=2,100.
In the case of a seventh tournament, the first one is cancelled and the new one is added, e.g. 200+300+400+500+600+500= 2,500.
A player who has not played in six tournaments, is unlucky; to climb in the classification, he should play more often.

Active players

Alexander agrees: “This is a ranking for active players. In my ranking, 349 names are mentioned, while in the EMA ranking there are 440. This means you see only the names  of those who really play and not the ones who are just kept alive. Take Nusreta Mauthner from Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has not played in a single tournament since 2007, but in the EMA Ranking, where the results of the European Championships play an important role, she still is on number 11. And what to think of Musto Topi from Finland, who still holds on to position 14, but has played in only four tournaments.
“The top-three in the EMA-list, Luca Gavelli, Anders Labich and Pascal Balorin, are in my list on positions 49, 112 and 47. And the European and World Championship are not included; their influence would count too heavy.”

Mix

The ‘Doppelhofers Lists’ are a mix of ‘old’ (like the EMA, he uses percentiles: points based on the results of a tournament, related to the number of participants, expressed in percents) and ‘new’ (the tournaments do not know a MERS ‘weight’ and only the results of the last year are used).
So, the Doppelhofers Lists are rankings. They have a start and finish in one year with a cup to mark it. The EMA lists actually are ratings: an ongoing score of results in a number of years.