FAQ

What's the difference between tier and rating?

BeachRank shows you two different forms of skill rating:

• Rating is your competitive rating. Only tournaments organized by reputable organizers affect this rating. As a general rule, those tournaments have to be publicly held and "reasonably" open to anyone at the general level of that tournament. This rating is slower to rise.
• Tier is the category of your "casual" rating. This is affected by all the games on the BeachRank platform - ranked or casual. This rating is more volatile and is on many counts self-reported - private games cannot be validated, so we take your word that the matches you've entered actually happened. Generally, you should be able to enjoy playing with your tier ±1.

Why do we need two separate ratings?

Because they answer two different questions. A competitive rating is only worth something if it can be trusted, so it counts nothing we cannot verify. A tier is only useful if it describes the games you actually play, and most of those are casual ones nobody is there to validate. Keeping them apart means self-reported results never inflate a competitive rating, and someone who never enters a tournament still ends up with a number that helps them find an even game.

What tiers are there?

There are 11 tiers in total that describe the casual rating of the player in BeachRank's population.

Why has the rating for my past games changed?

Sometimes, with the help of our users, we are able to get our hands on some historical data which we will then happily add to our database. That might change some historical ratings which in turn change current ones. Also, we are mostly happy with the underlying algorithm, but sometimes we do tweak it just a bit and that can also make us recalculate parts of our database.