Why

The most memorable games aren’t the ones we win easily, but the ones where every point is earned, and every teammate matters. True joy in sport comes when the contest is fair, fierce, and uncertain.

Anonymous

Balance = Challenge Without Frustration

While we all have experienced those games that just feel great (even if we don't win!), there is scientific evidence behind this: According to Flow Theory^* People are most engaged and happy when their skills are well matched to the difficulty of the task.

• If the other team is too strong, it feels hopeless or stressful.
• If they’re too weak, it feels boring or meaningless.
• When it’s even? You enter "flow" - the optimal mental state for enjoyment.

Stronger Sense of Achievement

• Winning against a worthy opponent feels earned, not hollow.
• Losing a close match still feels honourable and constructive.
• You feel like your effort and teamwork matter.

More Strategy, Less Chaos

• Balanced teams force better communication, planning, and adaptation.
• You need to play smarter, not just harder.
• It keeps everyone on the team mentally engaged, not just physically active.

Deeper Social Bonding

• Close games generate shared emotional highs and lows.
• You remember the epic rallies, the near misses — not blowouts.
• Respect between teams grows when it's a fair battle, not domination.

Evolutionary Psychology

• Humans are wired to enjoy cooperation under pressure.
• Even matches simulate real-world conflict resolution where stakes matter and success requires skill and teamwork.

In summary, even matchups create tension, excitement, and meaning - the core ingredients of what makes competitive sport deeply fun and satisfying.

How

Ok then... so what is this PIRAT thing?

Everybody that's not playing at the Geelong Pickleball Club

Motivation

When we started the Geelong Pickleball Club in early 2024 it was for a number of reasons, but one thing that I strongly believed was necessary to keep people interested in the game and to improve overall player satisfaction was to find a way to get more of the even matchups described above, or, to turn the argument around, to avoid situations where the players on a court where at significantly different stages of their pickleball journey.

I also wanted something that was more efficient and less subjective then a Grading Committee - a mechanism that would allow for players arriving at a session to be automatically placed into games where they would be experiencing more of the even matchups described above.

There is obviously existing mechanisms in Pickleball that claim to solve this problem - most notably DUPR, which is used globally to ensure that when players enter tournaments they're not sandbagging and actually play to their level. DUPR and PIRAT aim to do the same thing and while DUPR doesn't publish the internals of their system it is likely that like PIRAT, it is based on the Elo rating system, originally developed by Arpad Elo, a hungarian mathematician.

How does it work?

Essentially, PIRAT assumes that every player has a rating which predicts how likely they are to win a match. When you play with a partner, your ratings are combined, to create a predicted outcome, i.e. based on your combined ratings and the oppositions combined ratings PIRAT can make a prediction as to the outcome of a game - if your rating is higher than the oppositions rating you're expected to win the game - by how much depends on how much higher your rating is.

Assume you and your partner have a combined rating of 7.0, while the opposition has a combined rating of 6.0 - in an ideal world where the ratings accurately reflect your skills your team would be expected to win. PIRAT ratings change not necessarily based on whether you win or lose, but whether you're able to beat the expectation or not. Because if you beat the expectation, you've actually played better then what was predicted, which means your rating needs an upward adjustment to properly reflect where you're at.

Same goes the other way round - if your score is worse then predicted, then your rating is seen as too high, and thus receives a downward adjustment.

Why is PIRAT better than DUPR?

DUPR is a global system - everyone that signs up for a DUPR account starts at the same level (as of July 2025, a new player signing up for DUPR starts at 3.5). This is fair enough, as DUPR operates globally and has no local knowledge at all; they don't know any of the players personal history, they don't know whether they've played 25 years of professional tennis or have never held any racket in their hand their entire life.

PIRAT is different - with PIRAT you can use existing DUPR ratings as well as local knowledge to set up an initial rating; someone that comes to an induction session because they are just learning the ropes will be started on a lower rating than someone who's got a verified DUPR of 5.0; sometimes we set an initial PIRAT by simply observing someone play for 10 minutes. The point is - with PIRAT you can do that, and thus ensure a more accurate starting point for someone's rating. What we did at the GPC was that we started recording scores from the very beginning, and then introduced PIRAT a couple of months later, using the scores that we recorded earlier as the seeding values for everyone's PIRAT.

Both DUPR and PIRAT work best when you record lots of scores - that's because every time a score is recorded your rating becomes more reliable, in particular if the game is played amongst peers. The nice thing is that the system is self-correcting; we may have given someone an initial PIRAT that is slightly too high or too low - if they play enough games, the rating will adjust itself.

What about combined ratings?

Every player has their own individual PIRAT, but since we're mainly playing doubles, we need to calculate a combined rating for each team to be able to make a prediction for the outcome of a game. The straightforward approach would be to simply use the average of both player's PIRAT - however this is likely not going to produce the best results. It all comes back to even matchups again - if you have one team with two 6.0 players and the opposition team has a 4.0 and an 8.0 player their average rating is identical; however in all likelihood the team with the two 6.0 players will win that game. They will also in all likelihood not enjoy that game greatly, and neither will the opposition - for all the reasons mentioned above.

However this is an extreme example, and a matchup we really want to avoid in the first place - I just used it to highlight the fact that a big difference in the rating between two players that play together reduces their overall efficiency as a team. And the PIRAT system takes that into consideration, by lowering the combined PIRAT for a team, and thus the expected likelihood of them winning the game, proportionally to the difference in the individual players ratings.

Session Formats

One of the big advantages of having a rating system in widespread use is that it largely negates the need for explicitly graded sessions where only players matching certain criteria are invited to attend. If a venue has a decent number of courts available (6 or more is best) then players of all levels can attend the same session and will then be assiged to pools or courts based on their rating, which will allow everyone to have good games, as players with similar ratings will be grouped together.

The smaller these groups are, the better the game experience usually is - because a smaller group means a narrower band of ratings. When you play a random round robin format where you (ideally) play with a different partner each round, the size of the playing pool will determine the range of ratings in your pool. So if that pool has 20 players in them, there will generally be quite a substantial difference between the highest and lowest rated player in that pool, and chances are those two will play a game together at some point. However by using PIRAT, you can actually see the ratings of all the players in a pool before you start a session - and if deemed beneficial adjust the size of each pool to ensure a better mix. A good example would be having a group of beginners that are just starting out placed in their separate pool, to allow them to get some more playing experience and practice for a while until they're ready to be exposed to more experienced players.

An alternative to round robin play is a court based playing format, where a small group (typically 4, 5 or 6) players remain on that court for the whole session - due to the much smaller group size the chance of even matchups in each game is greatly increased there.

Don't forget what PIRAT is for

I often hear players talk about how they need to improve their rating (or worse, try to find ways to game the system to inflate their rating). With DUPR this has been a long standing problems, with players refusing to DUPR record games they are likely to lose, and organising games with the sole intention of inflating their DUPR ratings. Doing that completely misses the point - which is that we have these ratings so we can get the most enjoyment out of the games we play - not to feel superior or inferior based on a number.

Your rating will only go up if you are beating the expected outcome - that's why losing a close match against slightly better players shouldn't impact your rating, neither should winning a close match against slightly less rated players. For most players when they start using PIRAT, their rating will initially move into one direction for a while - up if their initial rating was too low, and down if it was too high. At some point the rating should stabilise, and from then on only change if you make significant improvements to your game (and your opposition doesn't), or if you have to step back due to injury or other issues (or are just having a bad day, wouldn't we all like to know how to avoid those!).

Want to use PIRAT?

If your club is interested in using the PIRAT system, get in touch with 002 - the 002 mobile app was built to work with the PIRAT system and has been used extensively at the Geelong Pickleball Club where all competitive session formats are scheduled and organised via the app and scores are easily recorded by the players themselves immediately after a game. 002 is currently adding tournament features to the app and is planning to make the app and the associated pickleball club management system available to other interested clubs starting in early 2026.

^*Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.