National Grading Scheme

The National Grading Scheme (NGS) has just gone live and there have been some significant updates to the members area. Also, there is now a new NGS Rankings page which you can visit to see the highest graded players and partnerships in the country, search for your friends and see some statistics about how the players are distributed amongst the various grades.



Here you can see the top players. The navigation links in the top left take you forward and backwards through the list and the 'Hide Evolving Grades' link will remove the players who haven't yet played 1000 boards (shown with a grey background with an 'E' icon on the right).

Search is simple - just type the surname of the person you're interested in in the box at the top right and hit enter. If you're searching for a common name it can get a bit slow, so you can add a comma after the surname and then the first few letters of the first name to narrow it down further. For example, try "Smith, P".

Members Area

In the members area you'll see three new columns in your sessions list. These are:

Sopp - the strength of your opponents in that session
Par - your percentage score compared with 'par' for that session
Grade - your resulting grade after that session


If you don't see these values for a given session it means it hasn't been processed by the NGS. This could be for a number of reasons, including: it's too recent (so wait a few more days), it's a teams event, it's a Sim Pairs result (only the local club heats are counted) or something went wrong.

As with many of the tables in the members area, you can click on the headings to sort them. So you can easily check just when it was that your grade was at its highest!

On the right you'll see a new button called 'NGS Info', under 'Change Password'. Click this to get up a new page which shows you information about your grade and your partnership history. You'll see all of your partnerships listed, but there will only be grades for the ones where you've played 300 boards or more.

Club Area

Club administrators will now also see some new features. The Members List will include a Grade column, with an icon indicating their Grade Band. Again, you can click on the header to sort it and find out who the best player in your club really is. The sessions list also includes a new column.



Here you can see the new NGS column, which will show the Strength Of Field for that session when it has been processed by the NGS (you can sort on this field too). The egg-timer icon indicates that the session is too recent to be processed. A red cross will indicate that it couldn't be processed for some reason. Hover your mouse over the icon and it will give you a description of why this happened.

Further Information

This was just a quick walk through the new features. For a more in-depth look at how the NGS works, take a look at the Full Guide, which includes comprehensive FAQs. Further queries can be addressed by email to ngsqueries@ebu.co.uk. Please note that we may not respond to your query directly but your email will be read and you'll be included in any bulk responses we send out in future.