How it works

How the ELO rating works

How every player's rating is calculated from match results.

Every player starts at 1000. After each match, the winner takes rating points from the loser. How many depends on the gap between them: beating a higher-rated player earns more than beating a lower-rated one. Nobody enters ratings by hand — the ladder is recomputed deterministically from the full match history. Re-run it over the same results and you get the exact same ladder, every time.

Skirmish weighting

Skirmishes are the higher-stakes events, so they carry 50% more weight than a regular weekly: the K-factor is multiplied by 1.5 (40 → 60) for a skirmish match. Both players are moved by the same amount, so ratings stay conserved and the ladder still recomputes to the exact same result every time.

Note: the headline rank, tier and ELO shown on the leaderboard and player profiles come from EloShowdown's worldwide rating feed. This skirmish weighting applies to our locally-computed ladder and per-set season ratings, and does not change those external headline ranks.