World Pinball Player Rankings update – closing out 2021 and moving to WPPR v5.7

After a 16-month hiatus, the IFPA began sanctioning events again in August 2021. Since then, we’ve sanctioned over 2000 tournaments and leagues, with nearly 12,000 unique players competing in an IFPA-sanctioned event. We’re glad to be back.

As we come to the end of another year, the 2022 season brings the changeover to our WPPR v5.7 system. This includes the start of IFPA Certified events. Certification brings with it a 20% boost to the WPPR points earned over other sanctioned events. Please see the IFPA Certified Tournaments page for details.

With v5.7, the IFPA is also tightening up the definitions for what we will sanction as an “IFPA Tournament” and “IFPA League.” In a nutshell, multi-day tournaments must end within 7 days of their starting date, and pinball leagues must have a minimum of 6 sessions per season, as well as adjustments to league attendance and format requirements. Additionally, to help support the development of women’s pinball in new regions, the minimum player requirement for events held at private locations will no longer apply to women’s-only events. A full overview can be found on the IFPA League and Tournament Definitions page. These sanctioning requirements will impact some events that have already been approved and added to our calendar, and we sincerely apologize for that inconvenience. Any tournaments or leagues already sanctioned for play with a starting date in January 2022 will be grandfathered in under the old rules. Any tournaments or leagues that begin play in February 2022 will have to follow these new requirements. The IFPA reserves the right to remove sanctioning from events that no longer meet our requirements.

In order to close the books on 2021, we ask any organizer with open tournament results to submit those to us by Tuesday, January 4th. Furthermore, any corrections to player misspellings, incorrect results, improper scoring issues, etc., need to be addressed by January 4th as well. Please take some time to review your own personal results to see if anything looks out of place.

Our plan is to lock down 2021 rankings on January 4th, and use the standings at that time for any IFPA-related campaigns (Stern Rewards Program, Player of the Year, etc.). Any errors caught after that point in time will NOT impact the 2021 standings, although those changes will be reflected in the 2022 rankings going forward.

The 2022 season brings with it the start of qualifying for the following IFPA campaigns:
– IFPA North American Championship Series
– IFPA Women’s North American Championship Series
– IFPA European Championship Series
– any IFPA Country Championship Series
– IFPA18 World Pinball Championship
– IFPA Women’s World Pinball Championship
– Stern Pro Circuit (2020-2022 season)

2022 is the first qualifying period for the IFPA Women’s North American Championship Series. Despite the name, we are currently focusing on supporting and expanding individual women’s state and provincial championships only, and there will not be a culminating national event. We look forward to building toward that goal in the future. Details on qualifying and event format can be found here. We have prepared standings for each state/province that has a championship director identified. If your location isn’t listed and you’d like to run a championship, please reach out to the IFPA Women’s Board at ifpawomen@gmail.com.

Thank you to all the organizers and players around the globe who make this hobby what it is, especially amidst the challenges and joys of the past year. As always, please reach out if you have any questions or need any guidance.

9 responses to “World Pinball Player Rankings update – closing out 2021 and moving to WPPR v5.7”

  1. Joseph Blasi says:

    Stern Pro Circuit (2020-2022 season)??
    so the little bit of 2020 counts?

  2. “Additionally, to help support the development of women’s pinball in new regions, the minimum player requirement for events held at private locations will no longer apply to women’s-only events.”

    Can you consider expanding this to youth events? As a leader of one of four The Little Flipper Chapters. We are working to protect the future of Pinball by getting kids ages 5-12 into playing tournaments. Some of them at private locations.

  3. Josh Sharpe Josh Sharpe says:

    No problem on that Matthew. I’ll update that verbiage in our rules to exclude Youth events as well.

  4. Louis Marx says:

    What prompted the minimum of six dates for leagues?
    This means that I’m going to have to completely redesign our local league formats.
    We’ve been running them this way for years with no complaints or problems…

  5. Ken says:

    I’d like like to know the logic behind six league dates?

  6. Josh Sharpe Josh Sharpe says:

    Having played in leagues since the 90’s, they were always primarily a social gathering of the local community of players. Many of these leagues that are still operating today played 70+ meaningful games per season. With tightening these definitions, we focused on leagues being about that longer term commitment of the player to be part of that community.

    Leagues were never meant to be the primary way for players to accumulate huge amounts of WPPR points. In fact Leagues were not sanctioned for WPPR’s at all until the 2009 season as part of the v3.0 rules changes.

    We had leagues that were 3 weeks long, where members kept their best 2 results, with the sole purpose of being allowed to count every player that participated once in the IFPA standings (inflating the player count of what we would consider true ‘league members’).

    Any community of players that is looking to simply maximize WPPR’s has the ability to do that through submitting individual Tournaments in for sanctioning. Other league organizers are extending their seasons to fit within these rules, which hopefully serves the purpose of motivating members to be more committed to attending.

    I understand the “We’ve been doing something X way for Y years, so this change is really inconvenient” side of this. It’s super inconvenient, especially dropping this at the end of the year, and we’re definitely sorry about how this is getting pushed out . . . but we genuinely feel it’s for the better of the WPPR system overall.

  7. Beau says:

    Great new changes! Keep it up guys!

  8. Matt C says:

    We have always ran a 6 session leauge but our 6th session has always been a Finals format usually top 16/or less than 50% of total players 4 player group seeded bracket.

    My question is, would this still qualify as a valid leauge format or do we need to change it?

    Thanks

  9. Matt C says:

    I found the answer on Pinside from Josh I think, 6 sessions of regular play so finals don’t count as a session. I’m just confused on the wording because it says the following in the League sanctioning rules.

    Except for League playoffs/finals, a session cannot be an ‘elimination’ format. All players need to play the same number of games.

    Is this ^ not calling Playoffs/Finals a session? To me it is calling finals or playoffs a session.

Leave a Reply