I had to slightly modify the IF conditional to this:
<vb:if condition="$members[0]['rank_id'] != 9">
as for some reason it would not assign the value to that variable.
Sorry, that was my fault - you couldn't get it to work because what I posted was wrong.
Anyway, what you did looks OK to me. Of course there are lots of ways to achieve the same thing, and since I didn't test what I posted it could have been wrong.