INSIDE THE GAME
How ratings and results work
A great player should have an edge. An upset should still be possible.
One player, different seasons
A player-year card represents a season in a player's career, rather than a single all-time rating. Doubles cards represent a pair in that season. The playable pool spans 1990–2026, allowing historical and modern entrants to meet in the same draw.
Historical results inform the ratings
The rating pipeline uses tournament-weighted Elo. Beating a stronger opponent produces a different adjustment from beating a weaker one, and tournament level affects the size of that adjustment. Winning a title does not simply add a fixed bonus to every player's rating.
The model also accounts for the amount of evidence available in a season and normalises cards for cross-era play. These are game-design choices. The displayed ratings are not official BWF rankings or an objective verdict on the greatest player.
Ratings influence probability, not a promised result
The match engine combines ratings with opponent history, consistency, match form, and game-to-game variation. A higher-rated entrant usually has an advantage, but individual rallies and matches can still go the other way. In a World Tour season, fatigue and injuries add another reason to plan recovery.
The score and rally log tell the same story
Each recorded rally awards a point to one side. Completed game scores follow the best-of-three, 21-point format with deuce and the 30-point cap. The game's adjustment for extreme scorelines is applied to the rally sequence before the final score is calculated, so playback and results agree.
Commentary describes those recorded rallies. Watching faster, pausing, or skipping playback changes how you view a match, not who wins it. An injury retirement stops the match at its recorded rally rather than inventing a completed game score.
Easy and Hard use the same competition
Easy displays draft ratings; Hard hides them. The difficulty selection changes the information you have when drafting, rather than adding a separate advantage to AI opponents.