Basics

Information about the Database

Last updated: 13 Apr. 2022

Tournaments

Currently there are 3420 tournaments in the database. These tournaments are all world championships, all world ranking tournaments, but also national championships, some national leagues and other tournaments.

Matches

The database consists of 675640 matches from January 2008 to April 2022. Out of these matches 191646 were orderly finished, the other 30376 are in the database, but were not played to the end. They were either aborted, usually due to an injury of one player, or they were not played at all, usually because there was no need for the match to be played. Either one player was promoted from a qualifying match or a team match was already decided before the match was played. Mostly only the matches that were properly finished are included in analyses.

Most matches were parsed on www.tournamentsoftware.com or one of its related pages. These websites constitute the official results service for the badminton world federation and some national associations. A minor percentage of the matches was gathered by manually entering them to the database.

  total MS WS MD WD MX
Matches 675640 216085 138643 122151 86198 112061
played 645264
96%		 206587
96%		 132245
95%		 117052
96%		 81948
95%		 107405
96%
with progression 191646
28%		 57473
27%		 42107
30%		 33197
27%		 26435
31%		 32431
29%
with server 526
0%		 113
0%		 120
0%		 109
0%		 102
0%		 82
0%
with odds 94310
14%		 28044
13%		 20312
15%		 16582
14%		 13428
16%		 15944
14%
per Continent            
Asia 151727
22%		 45429
21%		 32084
23%		 28890
24%		 21721
25%		 23490
21%
Europe 443903
66%		 143620
66%		 89799
65%		 80099
66%		 55986
65%		 74029
66%
North America 32757
5%		 11184
5%		 6430
5%		 5657
5%		 3427
4%		 6053
5%
South America 12302
2%		 4153
2%		 2744
2%		 1933
2%		 1270
1%		 2196
2%
Africa 14241
2%		 5181
2%		 3375
2%		 2191
2%		 1375
2%		 2112
2%
Australia & Oceania 20205
3%		 6367
3%		 4096
3%		 3290
3%		 2370
3%		 4082
4%

The table shows the numbers of matches, in total and divided by certain properties. The numbers don’t always add up to the total number, when properties are unknown.

There are also matches with experimental scoring systems in the database. 624022 of the 646959 matches with the scoring type known used the current default scoring of three games to 21.

Players

The database contains entries for a total of 48468 players. The following table shows the distribution of players by gender and by other criteria.

  Total Male Female Unknown
Total 48468 29368 18985 115
with IDs 31765 19280 12468 17
with date of birth 22066 13098 8963 5
with year of birth 23228 13842 9381 5
with handedness 5205 2908 2297 0
right-handed 4721 2607 2114 0
left-handed 484 301 183 0
with height 1399 716 683 0

For few players the gender is not known. This can happen in two ways: Either players only participate in mixed doubles only and their partners only play mixed doubles as well. In this case the program is unable to infer the genders of both players. The other case is when there is a pair or a group of players who only played singles against each other. As they never played against anyone from outside the group, information about the gender cannot flow in from outside the group.

Players with IDs contain at least one ID issued by the BWF or by a national badminton federation. These IDs are used to identify players across several tournaments and also to give further information, such as ranking positions, nationalities and ages. For many players their date of birth could be obtained using information from the profile associated with their ID or IDs. For some players the date of birth was entered manually and for some players only the year of birth is known. The date of birth can serve two purposes: It can be used to differentiate between players with the same or similar names. The date of birth is also used in analyses concerning the ages of players. For most analyses the year of birth would be sufficient, but for identifying players the date of birth is more useful, so we strive to include the date of birth when possible.

As handedness is important in badminton players’ handedness is also included in the database. The information whether a player is left- or right-handed can be obtained from the profile page at the BWF but for most players the handedness was observed in videos of their matches and then entered manually in the database. The height of players is currently not used in any analysis. The information about players’ height comes either from the information boxes shown in tournament videos or from websites showing information about the players, mostly from Wikipedia.

Players Per Country

We will look at the number of players per country. The numbers are only divided by gender. Only the ten countries with the most players are shown.

Rank Country Total Male Female Unknown
1 INA Indonesia 2639 1770 858 11
2 IND India 2438 1446 990 2
3 GER Germany 2264 1365 899 0
4 KOR South Korea 1767 1023 738 6
5 MAS Malaysia 1372 934 436 2
6 THA Thailand 1292 819 469 4
7 CAN Canada 1240 813 425 2
8 ESP Spain 1150 639 511 0
9 RUS Russia 1140 582 558 0
10 TPE Chinese Taipei 1029 624 403 2

The large number of players from Indonesia and India is not surprising due to their large population and the availability of tournament results on tournamentsoftware.com. Tournaments from China are difficult to obtain, thus there are not as many Chinese players as one could expect. The large number of players from South Korea is a bit of a surprise. There are some domestic tournaments included in the database, but this also holds true for e.g. Japan, which is not represented by as many players in the database. The large numbers of players from Germany, Canada, Spain and Russia is due to their domestic tournaments, whose results are also available via tournamentsoftware.com

Odds

There is information about odds present for about 94000 of the matches. This information was either collected using APIs provided by the bookmakers or scraping their websites. A large fraction of odds was also entered manually.