IRF Challenger Events 2006
- introduction and calendar
2006-06-11
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The Challenger Event icon, signalling "new stars" "in orbit"
around the official, and established, IRF Racketlon World Tour.

Challenger Events are not part of the official tour but "in orbit" around it. They are World Ranking Events but only about half the number of ranking points (Prestige Factor 0,5) are on offer compared to a standard World Tour Event (Prestige Factor 1). Also, the quality of each draw will influence the number of ranking points to be gained. See the attachment below for the details.

Challenger Events are also typically tournaments at the very frontiers of Racketlon growth and should therefore be particularly appealing to true Racketlon Pioneers. They are often opportunities to be involved with Racketlon history in the making as new countries are conquered - but they also mean an increased level of risk since they will not be as established as the official Tour Events. Caution is therefore recommended and players planning to take part should be adviced to carefully assess the risks for each Challenger Event individually. As is the case for any of the official Tour Events the IRF does not offer any guarantees that an event will actually take place. The life of a true Racketlon Pioneer is not always easy - but always interesting...

Challenger status are awarded to tournaments as opportunities emerge at any time during the year. The following Challenger Events have so-far been scheduled on the 2006 calendar:

For more details on these tournaments, see the EVENTS section.

For some of the ideas behind the Challenger concept, see newsitem from when they were first introduced.

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Attachment:
How many ranking points at a Challenger Event?

Challenger events count for the World Ranking - but since they are not part of the official World Tour they do not count for the World Tour Race.

The standard principles of the IRF World Ranking system (see description) apply to Challenger Events with the following amendments:

-Prestige Factor 0,5.
Half as many ranking points will be on offer in a Challenger event (for the same achievements) compared to what is on offer in a standard Tour event (Prestige Factor 1).

-Class Factor Qualification.
In addition, the quality of each individual draw is assessed in order to determine its Class Factor through a mechanism called "Class Factor Qualification" as follows;
Challenger draws are by default awarded Class Factor 1 (corresponding to Amateur=Class C Standard) unless they qualify for a higher factor in any of the following two ways:
1) If lower classes exist in the tournament the draw is qualified for a Class Factor 10 times as high as the immediately lower class.
2) An even higher Class Factor is awarded to the draw if at least one third of the players taking part in the draw belong to the corresponding class according to the world ranking.

Pre-condition:
As usual, Class Factors can only take values that are multiples of 10 and a maximum of 100. The maximum limit implies that if there are e.g. 4 classes then the lowest class will be pushed down to Class Factor 0,1.

Examples:
1) If there are two classes in Dutch Open, and the top class contains 40% Elite players it will be awarded Class Factor 100. If the second class contains only 25% Class B players then that will only be rewarded Class Factor 1 (i.e. the default).
2) If there is only one class in the Irish Open and that contains 10% Elite players and 25% Class B players it will be awarded Class factor 10 (since 35 % of the players are Class B or higher).

Ladies, Veterans, Juniors
The above description of Class Factor Qualification applies to the Men's Ranking Category. But the same principles apply for all other ranking categories. There is only one parameter that is different depending on the Ranking Category and that is the Default Class Factor, which varies as follows:
- Men's: Default Class Factor=1
- Ladies': Default Class Factor=10
- Juniors': Default Class Factor=100
- Veterans': Default Class Factor=100
(The idea behind different Default Class Factors in different Ranking Categories is simply that they should correspond to the typically lowest Class Factor at a standard Tour Event. That is what the Challenger draw gets if it does not "prove" that it deserves a higher factor.)

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