Two Ladders, Kept Apart
Competitive solving splits cleanly in two, and we've deliberately never let the halves touch. How fast you solve alone and how well you play against other people are different skills, and a single number claiming to measure both would flatter one and libel the other.
The boards
The leaderboards are the simplest of the three systems and the least forgiving. Daily and weekly, one per format, top hundred.
Ranking is on time, ascending. The tiebreak is fewest fails, and only then the earliest finish - and that last one decides display order only, never the credits. Ties genuinely share a rank: two solvers level on time and fails are both placed first, the next is third, and both of the leaders take the higher award.
Only completed grids count, and only your best attempt of the day. The weekly board is not a total - it is your single best day, Monday to Sunday.
One thing worth knowing: a position on a live board is not a placing. Boards are recomputed continuously while the day runs, and only stamped when the day closes. Until then you're watching a race, not reading a result.
The multiplayer ladder
Head-to-head play uses Glicko-2, which tracks two numbers about you rather than one: your rating, and how uncertain it is about that rating. Everyone starts at 1500 with maximum uncertainty.
The consequence is the thing that surprises new players most. The rating you're shown is not your rating. It's your rating minus twice the uncertainty - a deliberately pessimistic figure, the number the system is confident it can defend. A brand-new player sits internally at 1500 but displays 800, and lands in Bronze rather than the middle of the table.
That is not a demotion. It is the system declining to guess. Play ranked games and the uncertainty falls; as it falls, the displayed rating climbs toward the real one without you necessarily winning anything. Ten games in, you're no longer provisional.
Matchmaking, incidentally, pairs on the true rating, not the displayed one - so you're always matched against what the system actually thinks of you, and shown what it can prove.
Seven tiers, two hundred points apart, each cut into three grades from III up to I: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Grandmaster above 2400.
The rating you're shown is not your rating. It is the number the system is confident it can defend.
Promotion protection
Losing a tier is harder than gaining one. Once promoted, you hold the new tier until you fall roughly fifty points below its floor - so a single bad game immediately after a promotion can't undo it.
This does mean the tier and the rating can briefly disagree, and the tier is telling the truth about where you've been rather than where you are this minute.
The divisions
Single-player has an entirely separate structure, and it's a league rather than a ladder: League Two, League One, the Championship and the Premier League.
You are not placed by points against a fixed threshold. You are placed against everybody else. The field is ranked on points banked in Compete mode over a rolling ninety days, and cut into four equal quarters. The top quarter is the Premier League by definition, not by qualification.
Two consequences follow, and both are intentional. Standing still relegates you, because the ninety-day window keeps moving and your best week eventually falls out of the back of it. And your division depends on how everyone else played, not only on how you played.
Practice mode banks nothing. Placings recompute daily.
You see your own division and nothing else - there's no public table. Move up or down and you get a card telling you so, once, which you dismiss.