About Challonge Ratings

Challonge Ratings are based on the Elo Rating System. They denote a player or team’s skill level within an organization.

How to Enable Challonge Ratings

A tournament must satisfy three requirements in order to activate the Challonge Rating System:

  1. The tournament must be hosted by an organization.
  2. The tournament must be labeled with a game.
  3. The tournament must include Challonge users or teams, not just basic text participant names.

Meet these requirements, and you’ll automatically see a “Leaderboards” tab on your organization’s homepage. The players in the tournament will get a rating if they don’t already have one, and matches between rated players will impact each player’s rating.

The Rating Scale

Ratings start at 1000 and typically range between 0 and 2850. A rating greater than 2400 is considered “Pro”, but remember, it’s relative to players within the organization, so don’t let it go to your head!

When you play a rated match, the outcome's effect on your rating depends on several factors. In general, however, these three scenarios explain changes in rating:

  1. If you're expected to win and you do, you and your opponents ratings won't change much.
  2. If you're expected to win but you don't, your rating will drop considerably and your opponent's will rise considerably.
  3. If your rating is similar to your opponent's, any outcome will moderately affect both players.

Why Ratings Require an Organization

Ratings describe skill level among a group of people relative to each other, and on Challonge, organizations are the logical way to partition these groups of people.

To illustrate this, imagine a local ping pong bar in New York City and a professional table tennis training facility in Beijing. If the New York players never face off against the Beijing players, there’s no way to compare skill levels between the two locations. In fact, a 2500 rated New York player might be worse than a 800 rated Beijing player.

Moreover, gameplay standards vary between groups of people. One group might play on old arcade machines with broken buttons, whilst another plays on emulators with brand new controllers.

Technical Specs

The Challonge Rating System is configured to use FIDE settings. This means that the following values are used when rating a match:

Normal K-Factor: 15
Starting Player Rating: 1000
Pro Player Threshold: 2400
Beginner Player Game Boundary: 30

With FIDE Settings, the K-factor can fluctuate for new or pro players:

New Player (<30 games played): 25
Normal Player: 15
Pro Player: 10