How scoring works in Challenge Ladder

Every Challenge Ladder match pays both sides. Where you sit on the ladder is your season points total, re-sorted after every result.

Three things decide what a match is worth: who won, how close it was, and how far apart the two sides were on the ladder.

Points come from each side's share of the rallies played, not from the raw scoreline. A side that took 60% of the points in a match took 60% of the points whether the match was to 11, to 15, best of three or best of five.

This is why the format does not care what you play to. Two matches with the same shape are worth the same, so entrants who play different lengths are still on one comparable ladder.

The loser

The losing side scores their share of the match, up to a ceiling of 10.

A close loss is worth close to that ceiling; a heavy one is worth very little. Losing never costs you points — you just add fewer than the winner did.

The winner

A winner starts from a base of 10 and adds their margin.

Beating someone at or above your level — including an opponent exactly one spot above you — pays the base plus the margin, never less than 11.
Beating someone more than one spot above you is an upset. The margin is amplified by half the gap between you, then held between 15 and 25. Beating someone far above you is worth a lot, but there is a ceiling on it — you cannot climb the whole ladder on one result.

The How much the score matters setting controls how heavily the margin counts. Lower it and results start to matter more than scorelines.

Challenge matches count for less

A match you started yourself is worth a fraction of the same result in your assigned match:

Half, if you also played your assigned match for the round.
A quarter, if you did not.

This is applied per side, so in a challenge between someone who played their assigned match and someone who skipped it, the two are discounted differently in the same match.

The effect is deliberate: challenges add to a season, they do not replace it. Playing four challenges instead of your assigned match will not out-score playing the match you were given.

Byes and unplayed matches

A bye is worth nothing, and neither is a match that was never played. There is no penalty either way — you keep the points you have and simply add none for that round.

Walkovers

A result with almost no rallies in it is not a scoreline — it is a walkover written down. Those pay the winner the floor for their situation and the other side nothing, rather than reading as a total demolition and paying more than a genuine one.

Which positions a match is scored against

The gap that matters is the one captured when the match was created, not the one showing today.

That matters because the ladder moves all season. Without it, entering an old result would score it against a ladder that has since changed, quietly rewriting what a match from six weeks ago was worth.

Late scores and corrections

Every score entry re-scores the whole division from scratch. Results can be entered in any order, weeks late, or corrected after the fact, and the ladder ends up in the same place either way.

There is nothing to recalculate by hand and no order you have to enter things in.

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