How the Century Radar Form Rating Actually Works

There are already snooker rankings. World Snooker publishes the official prize-money table; commentators reach for it every match. So why build another one?

Because the official ranking measures the wrong thing for the question most fans are asking.

The official table is a two-year rolling sum of prize money. It rewards consistency, longevity, and the ability to deep-run in majors. It's a good measure of career standing. But it tells you almost nothing about form right now. A player who lifted a trophy 18 months ago and has slipped since still sits near the top. A player on a brutal run of late-round wins this season barely moves because the points haven't dropped off yet.

That gap, between "great career" and "in form today", is what the Form Rating measures.

The mechanics

Under the hood it's a margin-of-victory Elo, computed over a rolling 12-month window. Every tracked match nudges both players' ratings: the winner gains, the loser loses, and the size of the move depends on three things.

Margin matters. A 13–2 demolition moves the needle more than a 13–12 squeaker. The rating weights by frame margin, not just W/L. If you grind every match to a one-frame finish, your rating moves slowly even when you keep winning.

Strength-adjusted. Beating a higher-rated player earns more. Beating a lower-rated player earns less. And blowouts by big favourites are dampened. Trump beating an amateur 10–0 doesn't inflate his number, because the rating already expected that outcome.

Last 12 months only. This is current form, not career. A run from two seasons ago has zero weight today. The rating recomputes after every tracked event.

What it doesn't do

The Form Rating is not the official ranking, doesn't predict prize money, and isn't a prediction model in disguise. It's a backward-looking measure of how a player has actually been performing, weighted toward what they've done recently and how decisively they've done it.

If you want the player who's about to win the next ranking event, that's a different question. And a different rating, one we'll get to.

For now: when Zhao Xintong sits at 1,776 and Judd Trump at 1,771, that's not a prediction of who'd win on Saturday. It's a statement that, by the math, those two have been the most in-form pros on tour for the last 12 months. Pull up either of their profiles and you can see exactly which matches got them there.

We compute the whole thing from real CueTracker match data. 1,372 matches across 25 events at the time of this post. Nothing simulated, nothing scraped from a leaderboard. The next post in this series walks through one season of Trump's matches and shows the rating move frame by frame.