The Sudoku ladder
The hundred highest ratings, best first. Every position on it was earned in a rated duel against another person on the same grid.
Fetching the standings…
| # | Player | Rating | W / L | Games |
|---|
How a position here is earned
Only by beating people. There is no score for solving puzzles quickly on your own, no streak to maintain and nothing to collect — the number beside a name moved because somebody on the other side of a grid lost the same number of points, which is what makes it comparable between two players who have never met.
Because points are taken rather than awarded, the total across the whole ladder barely moves. A player climbing is a player somebody else came down for, and that is the property that stops the board drifting upwards over time the way a points-per-puzzle system always does.
Why some players are missing
A player is listed once they have played enough rated games for the number to mean anything. Before that their rating is mostly the value everybody starts at, moved by a handful of results and a deliberately large adjustment, so listing them above somebody with a season behind them would be ranking the noise rather than the players.
They still have a rating, a record and a history from their first game. What they do not have yet is a position, which arrives on its own once they have played enough.
A player who deletes their account leaves the board, and their finished matches stay. That is deliberate: the games they played moved somebody else’s rating, and those results cannot be honestly unwound just because one of the two people has gone.
How current these numbers are
This page is rebuilt from the database every few hours rather than on every visit. A ladder is read far more often than it changes, and the alternative — querying the whole standings for every reader and every crawler — would spend the site’s entire database budget on a table that is the same as it was a minute ago.
So a match that finished moments ago may not have reached this page yet. Your own rating is not on the same delay: it is shown to you the moment the result is written, on the page where you played.
Common questions
How do I get on the Sudoku ladder?
Take a name, play ranked duels, and keep playing until you have enough rated games for a position. Winning is what moves the number; playing is what makes it count.
How often is the ladder updated?
Every few hours. It is read far more often than it changes, so it is served from a cached copy rather than queried afresh for every visitor.
Why is my rating not on the ladder yet?
Because you have not played enough rated games for it to mean much. Until then the number is mostly its starting value, and listing it against established players would be ranking chance.