INSIDE THE GAME

How ratings and results work

Player-season cards

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.

Match probabilities

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.

Scores and rally logs

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 rally history and the result screen describe the same match, including unusually one-sided games.

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.

Difficulty settings

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.