How Elo ratings work
Score-based Elo that rewards margin of victory and splits a doubles change between partners. The knobs are there if you want them.
A rating is one number that estimates how strong a player is. Record a game and that number moves — up for the over-performers, down for the under-performers — based on what actually happened on court. After a handful of games it settles near a player's real level. That's what keeps matchups close and makes the standings mean something.
PickleFriend uses an Elo system — the same family of math behind chess and many competitive games — adapted for doubles play.
It's the score that moves your rating, not just the win
PickleFriend doesn't just ask did you win? — it asks by how much?
- A blowout (11–2) moves ratings more than a nail-biter (11–9).
- Beating a much stronger player or pairing moves your rating more than beating someone you were expected to beat.
- Losing a close one to a tougher opponent barely costs you anything.
So margin of victory matters. A team that grinds out tight wins all night climbs differently than one that wins a couple of routs and loses the rest.
Doubles is shared between partners
In a doubles game the rating change for a pairing is split between the two partners — but not always 50/50. By default the lower-rated partner takes the larger share of the swing and the higher-rated partner takes the smaller share.
When a stronger and a weaker player win together, the result tells you more about the weaker player, so their rating reacts more. The ratio is tunable — see below.
What "no rating" means
A blank or no rating is not the same as a rating of zero.
- No rating means the player hasn't been rated yet — they're new, or they're in a group that doesn't use ratings. The system leaves them blank on purpose and supplies a sensible starting number the first time they record a game.
- Zero would be an actual position on the scale — the bottom. The system never quietly turns "unrated" into zero.
This is why a fresh player shows no number until their first game, then enters near the middle of the scale rather than at the floor.
The knobs you can turn
Every group can tune how its ratings behave. On a ladder, these settings are ladder-wide — they apply across every division.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Scale | How far apart two ratings have to be to predict a given win chance. At the default (400, on the 1500-point scale) a ~200-point gap predicts the stronger team winning about 75% of the time. A smaller scale makes the same gap count for more — it predicts more lopsided results; a larger one packs ratings closer together for the same odds. Scale pairs with the default rating, so Group Settings suggests a matching value and shows live examples like "1400 vs 1600 = 75%". |
| Base K-factor | How big each game's adjustment is — the volatility of the ratings. Turn it up and ratings respond fast to recent results; turn it down for slow, stable numbers. It's auto-scaled for doubles play and for your win-bonus setting, with a recommended value that tracks your scale. |
| Win bonus | A dial between two ways of scoring a game: did you win, or by how much? At 0 (the default) only the margin counts — the rating change comes purely from the score ratio, so a blowout moves ratings more than a nail-biter. At 1.0 only the result counts — the margin is ignored and a win is a win. Values in between mix the two (0.5 = half-and-half). Higher settings also damp the overall swing, since a bare win/loss is noisier than a score. |
| Protect winners | An optional rule so a team that wins never loses rating points — even on a narrow win over much weaker opponents they were heavily favored to beat. Off by default, and marked experimental. |
| Partner split | How a doubles rating change is divided between the higher- and lower-rated partner. The default (35% to the higher-rated player) assumes the stronger partner is less involved in the rally, which partly shields their rating; set it to 50% to split every change evenly. |
The defaults are tuned for everyday play. These controls exist for the organizer who wants a faster-moving ladder, a 1–10 scale, or a gentler curve for a brand-new beginner group.
Auto-calibration: matching the scale to your numbers
Default rating, scale, and base K-factor are linked. If you change the size of the numbers — seeding players on a 1–10 scale, or importing ratings from another system — the scale and K-factor need to move with them, or the math drifts: a 200-point gap means one thing on a 1500-point scale and something very different on a 1–10 scale.
You don't have to work that out by hand. In Group Settings → Ratings:
- Set your default rating to the middle of your players' range.
- The Scale and Base K-factor fields each show a blue, underlined Recommended value derived from that default. Click either number to fill it in.
The Scale field also shows live win-probability examples — like "1400 vs 1600 = 75%" — so you can sanity-check the spread before you save. And if you set a custom rating, or you're about to enter scores while some players sit outside the standard rating band, PickleFriend surfaces a tip that points you back to this same calibrator.
Starting point and the default rating
Every player who hasn't played a rated game yet shows no rating — that blank is intentional (see What "no rating" means above). The moment a score is recorded, the system supplies a starting number and begins updating from there.
That starting number is the group's default rating, which is 1500 by default and can be adjusted in Group Settings → Ratings. A higher or lower number doesn't change the math — it just shifts where "the middle of the pack" sits on the scale. If your group uses a small 1–10 scale you'd set a default near 5; if you're mirroring a DUPR-adjacent scale you'd set it somewhere in that range instead.
How ratings display
The number you see is rounded depending on the size of the rating:
| Rating magnitude | Decimal places | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 10 | 3 | 4.207 |
| 10 to 99 | 2 | 42.07 |
| 100 or higher | 1 | 1500.3 |
This keeps small-scale ratings readable (a 1–10 group needs three decimal places to show any movement at all) without cluttering large-scale ratings with meaningless extra digits. On the ladder standings table, ratings are always shown to 2 decimal places regardless of scale — that view is designed for comparison and the extra precision helps.
Individual ratings vs. team ratings
Everything above describes how PickleFriend tracks individual ratings — one number per player, updated after every game. That's the default for all groups, including ladder leagues.
If your group uses fixed partnerships and you want the team to be the rated entity rather than the individual players, there's a separate Team Rating Mode. In that mode, ratings are stored per partnership, standings show team numbers, and the mixer uses the team rating to balance courts. Individual players still accumulate a secondary per-player rating, but it doesn't drive anything.
See Team ratings for how that mode works.
What's next
- New players settle in over their first several games — see Placement games.
- Ratings only move when scores get recorded — see Organizer score entry.
- Joining or moving between divisions? See how movers get seeded in Start ratings.