Questions, answered

Entirely by fan voting. Two athletes are shown head-to-head, you pick the greater one, and both ratings move. There is no editorial panel and no hidden stat model — but there is a bar: an athlete gets a rank number only once their rating is settled enough to mean something.

Glicko-2. It is Elo’s successor and it carries a second number — the rating deviation, or how confident the system is. That is the part a plain Elo score leaves out: an athlete at 1500 after two votes and one at 1500 after four hundred look identical under Elo, and they are not remotely the same claim. Everyone starts at 1500 with a deviation of 350, which is to say a complete unknown.

Because their ratings have not settled. An athlete is provisional until they have 30 counted matchups and a deviation at or below 110; until then they are listed separately with no rank number at all — not a low rank, no rank. The site is young and almost nobody has cleared that bar, so the board says so plainly rather than numbering a list that would not mean anything.

Both ratings move the moment you vote. Ranks, day-over-day movement and the “as of” boards come from a snapshot written once a day at 00:10 UTC, because “where did they stand last Tuesday” cannot be answered from current state.

Yes — that is the point, and it is why there are two ratings. Cross-sport votes move an athlete’s global rating, the fan-preference index behind the main board. Only same-sport votes move their sport rating, which is what the per-sport boards show. A boxer beating a golfer says something about reputation and nothing about boxing.

27 of them, from basketball and soccer through to snooker, darts and skateboarding. Every athlete in the pool has a sourced birth year, country, discipline and cited biography; entries that could not be completed from a source were dropped rather than filled in.

Each matchup is served with a short-lived, single-use signed token, so a vote cannot come from something that never loaded the page and cannot be submitted twice. Rate limits cap the pace. Voting that looks automated is quarantined — kept in the record, excluded from the maths, and reviewed. Nothing is ever deleted, and because every rating is recomputed from the vote log, clearing a batch restores the ratings exactly.

No, and the site will not pretend otherwise. This measures which athletes a crowd of fans prefers. It does not simulate a contest, adjust for era or account for rule changes. The full argument is on the methodology page.

No. Voting is free, needs no account, and never will. Signing in is optional and only adds things — your own ballot, and following athletes.