How the rating works

Where you start

If you told us your Riot rank when you joined, you start at the rating for that tier. If we have no rank for you, you start at 1000.

It is a starting position, not a bonus — every game moves it, so a Diamond who keeps losing ends up below a Gold who keeps winning. Players who were already in the league before 1 August 2026 start at 1000 whatever rank they later told us: their games already measured them, and a tier typed in afterwards doesn't get to rewrite them.

What a game is worth

Teams are built to be even, so most games are close to a coin flip — and an even game is worth half of your K either way. Beat a side you were expected to lose to and you gain more; lose to one you were expected to beat and you lose more.

Those figures use the settled K of 16. Everyone on a side shares the same expectation — the result was the team's — so nobody is blamed more for a loss than their teammates.

Why new players move faster

A rating nobody has tested should be easy to move, and one built from a hundred games should not. So K starts at 64 and falls towards 16 as you play, halving the gap every 40 games.

This is also how a wrong starting rank gets fixed. Somebody seeded far below where they actually play climbs out in roughly a third of the games it would otherwise take — though if your rank is simply wrong, ask an admin to correct it rather than waiting.

Staying away

Missing a night costs nothing. Decay is measured in weeks away, not games missed, so a busy night and a quiet one are the same thing to it.

After 3 weeks without a game, every further whole week costs 25 — and only while you are in the top 5 of the ladder. It exists so nobody holds the top by not turning up; below that, being away for a while is just an ordinary month.

It stops as soon as it has moved you out of the top 5, and never takes anybody below 800. Playing once resets the clock entirely.

What the number can't tell you

Because teams are evened out every night, each result carries very little information about any one of the ten people in it. That puts a hard limit on what the table can say:

• Two players within about 50 points of each other are, as far as this can tell, the same player.
• A gap of 200 or more is worth taking seriously.
• Below about ten games the number is mostly your starting rank. That is why the ladder leaves those players out.

The Riot rank beside your name is a different claim from the league rating, which is why both are shown and both are labelled. Yours is what you play at; the league rating is only what these games have measured.

The arithmetic

Every rating is rebuilt from scratch on every recompute, in this order:

expected = 1 / (1 + 10 ^ ((their average − your average) / 400))

change = K × (result − expected)

K = 16 + 48 × 0.5 ^ (games played / 40)

rating = starting rating + every change, in order + any admin adjustment