Expert: Josh - 5/7/2006

Question
I want to know what my average placement percentile is.  By this I mean I want to know how good I am doing in my overall tournament work.  

I have an excel spreadsheet with a column of "total players" and a column next to it of what I finished.  How do I calculate on a per tournament basis what I finished in.

I can calculate an average easily after I have that.  But how do I get the percentile when I finished 30th out of 1967 players?

Answer
Hi Gregg,

Percentile bands may be expressed in a number of ways. For instance, the following percentiles
"96%+", "90-95%" and "80-89%" correspond to candidates in the "top 4%", "top 5-10%" and "top 11-20%", respectively. In this example, the last two bands are sometimes simply referred to as "top 10%" and "top 20%". But of course, there are many variations on how the bands are split.

If you are ranked "n" out of "N" players, your score is x=100(1-(n/N)).

In your case, n=30, N=1967. Your tournament score is x=100*(1-30/1967)=98.47. Depending on how the percentile bands are split, you can say that you are in the top 2% or placed in the "98%+" percentile band.

In Excel, suppose that "n" occupies A2, "N" occupies B2.
Let C2 be "x". Formula for C2 = 100*(1-(A2/B2))
Then, you can average column C to find the average percentage.