No black box
How the Elo works
Every archived battle is replayed in chronological order, oldest first. You win the points your opponent loses. Beating someone stronger than you pays more than beating someone weaker — and that is the whole idea.
Here is the entire algorithm, with the real numbers taken from the code that computes the ranking.
The formula
Two lines, and nothing else. First, your chance of winning against that opponent:
Then your new rating, once the battle is decided:
- Rtoi
- your rating before the battle
- Radv
- your opponent's rating
- E
- your expected chance of winning, between 0 and 1
- S
- the result: 1 if you win, 0 if you lose
- V
- the winner’s share of the votes, between 0.5 and 1 — this is what scales K
- 32
- the most a single battle can move you, 32
K isn’t quite fixed: it’s multiplied by the winner’s share of the votes. A 5-0 moves the full 32 points, a 3-2 moves 19. The winner always climbs and the loser always drops — what changes is how far, never which way. When votes aren’t on record, we assume it was unanimous.
Everyone starts at 1500. No placement matches, no provisional rating: your first battle counts exactly like your hundredth.
What a win is worth
Everything follows from the rating gap between you and your opponent. Negative gap = they are ranked above you. The points below are those of a unanimous decision, so the maximum.
| Rating gap | Your chance | If you win | If you lose |
|---|---|---|---|
| -400 underdog | 9% | +29 | -3 |
| -200 underdog | 24% | +24 | -8 |
| -100 underdog | 36% | +20 | -12 |
| -50 underdog | 43% | +18 | -14 |
| 0 even | 50% | +16 | -16 |
| +50 favourite | 57% | +14 | -18 |
| +100 favourite | 64% | +12 | -20 |
| +200 favourite | 76% | +8 | -24 |
| +400 favourite | 91% | +3 | -29 |
Points are exchanged: what you win, your opponent loses, down to the last point. Nothing is created, nothing disappears — the ladder is a closed system.
A worked example
You are rated 1500. You meet someone rated 1800, so 300 points above you.
Your expected chance of winning is 15%.
- You win: you take 27 points and climb to 1527.
- You lose: you drop 5 points to 1495.
A win here is flagged as an upset on your profile: we mark any win where your chance was under 30%, which starts at roughly 148 points of gap.
What counts, what doesn't
Counted
- Any battle with a declared winner, in a category attached to one of the four ladders.
- The vote margin, when it's on record: winning 3-2 isn't worth the same as winning 5-0.
- Every round the same way: a first round moves you exactly as much as a final.
- Battles from 2006 to today, replayed in the order they happened.
Not counted
- Draws — no winner, so no points move.
- Battles whose winner we have not archived yet.
- Wildcards, showcases and eliminations: those are rankings, not head-to-head battles.
- Categories outside the four ladders (showmatches, exhibitions, formats we cannot compare).
- Tag team against crew: two different ladders, no honest way to pick one.
And on purpose, none of this is in there
- No bonus for winning a big event — a GBB round is worth a local round.
- No per-judge weighting: a world champion's vote counts like any other judge's.
- No decay: stop battling and your rating stays exactly where you left it.
- No numeric scores, no crowd size, no seeding: we count how many judges picked each side, not what they scored.
Four separate ladders
A loopstation battle has nothing to do with a solo battle, so ratings never mix. You can be King in one ladder and Rookie in another — and that is correct.
For team battles the ladder comes from what the team IS (tag team or crew), not from the name of the category it competed in.
The tiers
Tiers are relative to the ladder you are in, not to your rating: they say where you stand among your peers.
- King Rank 1
- Elite Ranks 2 to 5
- Pro Top 20%
- Headliner Top 50%
- Rookie Everyone else
Which means a tier can change under you as the ladder grows — more people ranked, tighter top 20%.
Why your rank moves when you haven't battled
The ranking is not a running total we add to. Every time the archive changes, the whole ladder is wiped and recomputed from the first battle of 2006. Referencing an old event therefore rewrites the history that follows it: if someone beat you in 2018 and that battle lands in the archive today, everything after it is recalculated.
It is the honest way to do it — the ranking always reflects the archive as it stands, not the order in which we happened to type it in.
The green dots
The five dots next to a name are the last five rated battles, most recent on the right. Filled means a win. We only show them from four rated battles on: below that, a couple of results say nothing about form.
A battle or an event is missing? Tell us