Win rate tells you how often you win, but not who you beat. Taking a pod of three strong players at a big event and taking a pod at a quiet weeknight event both count as one win. An Elo rating fixes that: every game moves your number by an amount that depends on who was at the table. We work one out for every reader who links their TopDeck.gg profile to the Game Tracker. It comes from tournament games only, and this page goes through exactly how.
Summary
- Everyone starts at 1500
- Only tournament games count, the ones we bring in from TopDeck.gg. Games you log yourself never move it
- A pod is scored as a set of head-to-heads: the winner beat each of the other three, and the other three each lost to the winner
- K is 40 for your first 10 rated games, then 24. An even four-player win is worth about 20 points to a new player, and 12 after that
- Everyone at the table is rated, not just readers here, so beating a strong player counts for what it should
- What one player gains the others lose, so the average stays at 1500
- Your rating shows in your own results, on your profile if you choose, and anonymously in bands on the game statistics page
Where your rating comes from
Link your TopDeck.gg profile in the Game Tracker and we read the tournament tables you’ve sat at, back to January 2020. Each table gives us who sat where and who won. That’s all a rating needs.
Games you log yourself don’t count, and won’t. For a casual game we have your side of it and nobody else’s. A rating built from half the information is worse than none. A tournament table on TopDeck.gg is the same record for everyone who played at it.
Note: A table TopDeck.gg hasn’t finished, with no winner and no draw, isn’t rated. Nor is a table where the winner it names isn’t one of the players at it, or a bye.
How a four-player pod is scored
Elo was built for chess, where one player beats one other. A cEDH pod has four players and one winner, so we turn each game into head-to-heads:
- the winner beat each of the other three
- each of the other three lost to the winner
- the three who lost aren’t compared with each other at all, because they all lost the same game. Nobody “came second”
- a draw is a draw between every pair at the table
For each head-to-head we work out what you were expected to score, from the gap between the two ratings. Two equal players are expected to score half each. A player 200 points higher is expected to score about three quarters, so beating them scores you a lot more than they’d have got for beating you.
Your rating then moves by K, shared out across the other players at the table, times the difference between what happened and what was expected, added up over your head-to-heads. Sharing K out by the number of opponents keeps a four-player win worth about what one win is worth in chess.
Worked examples
All four players below are past their first 10 games, so K is 24.
| What happened | Your change | Each opponent |
|---|---|---|
| Four players all on 1500, you win | +12 | −4 |
| Four players all on 1500, someone else wins | −4 | winner +12, others −4 |
| You’re on 1500, the other three are on 1700, you win | +18.2 | −6.1 |
| You’re on 1800, the other three are on 1400, you win | +2.2 | −0.7 |
| You’re on 1800, a 1400 player wins | −7.3 | winner +15.3, others −4 |
Two things stand out. Beating a strong table is worth a lot, and beating a table rated well below you is worth very little. Losing works the other way round. You only lose points to the winner, so losing to a much stronger player costs you little, and losing to a weaker one costs more.
Your first 10 games
A new rating starts at 1500 because we know nothing about you yet, and that’s almost certainly wrong in one direction or the other. So for your first 10 rated games K is 40 instead of 24, and your rating moves faster while it finds its level. An even four-player win is worth 20 points then instead of 12. Your results say when your rating is still settling in.
Why everyone at the table is rated
If we only rated readers here, most of your opponents would be unrated. A win over the best player at an event would then count the same as a win over someone at their first. So we rate every player at every table we read, readers or not, in the order the tournaments were played, round by round. Your opponents’ ratings are worked out from their games too, which is what makes beating them mean something.
Players who aren’t readers here are never shown or named. We keep each of them only as a scrambled code made from their TopDeck.gg id, with a rating and a number of games, so the maths works. The privacy notice says more.
Where your rating shows
- In your Game Tracker results, only to you: your rating now, your highest, how many rated games it’s built from, and a graph of how it moved after each tournament
- On your public profile, only if you’ve switched your TopDeck.gg games on there. It sits in your TopDeck.gg section, and a comparison with another player shows both ratings side by side
- On the game statistics page, with no names: how readers’ ratings spread, in bands, once ten readers who show their TopDeck.gg games have a rating with 10 games behind it. A band with fewer than three readers in it isn’t shown
Switch your TopDeck.gg games off your profile, or unlink TopDeck.gg, and your rating comes off your profile straight away.
How often it updates
New tournament games come in from TopDeck.gg every morning, and ratings move as they arrive. When you first link a profile, your recent tournaments come in the next morning and the rest of your history on the Sunday after. Every so often we read everyone’s history again, and then every rating is worked out from the start, so it always matches the games we hold.
Why it won’t match TopDeck.gg’s leaderboard
TopDeck.gg runs a leaderboard of its own, rated from every event on its site. Ours is worked out from the tournaments our readers have played in, so the field is smaller and the numbers will differ. Neither is wrong. Ours is there to show how your own tournament play is going over time, and how it compares with the people you play against.
If something looks wrong
- No rating at all. You need a linked TopDeck.gg profile and at least one finished tournament table. If you’ve only just linked, your recent games come in the next morning and older ones on the Sunday after
- A tournament is missing from the graph. Check it’s on your TopDeck.gg profile under the same account you linked. A table with no result on TopDeck.gg isn’t rated
- Your number jumped after a re-import. When everyone’s history is read again, ratings are worked out from the start, in date order. A tournament that came in late can change what came after it. That’s the rating putting things in the right order
Where to go next
- Link your TopDeck.gg profile in the Game Tracker to get a rating of your own
- See how readers’ ratings spread on the game statistics page
- Find a tournament to play in on the tournament calendar