HOW RANKINGS WORK

You do not need any of this to play. If all you want to know is "do better, earn a higher rank," you are already set. But if you are curious, here is the whole thing, start to finish. The only math you will need is percentages, multiplication, and squaring a number.

THE BIG IDEA

Your rank is based on how you place each night, not on your raw score. Here is the problem that solves. Every night has a different set of questions, and even though we work to keep the difficulty consistent, no two question sets land exactly the same way. The mix of topics on any given night will suit some teams more than others, so a score of 95 one night is not necessarily the same achievement as a 95 on another. Adding raw scores across the season would quietly reward or punish teams based on which nights they happened to play.

So we rank instead. Here is the key fact that makes ranking fair: every bar running trivia on a given night plays the exact same questions. So if 60 teams across 5 bars all play this Monday, you are ranked against all 60 of them, not just the teams at your own bar. Your placement in that whole group is a clean, difficulty-proof measure of how you did. Natural variation between question sets can move everyone's raw scores up or down together, but it never changes who placed where.

STEP 1: WHO GETS RANKED

Before any math, we figure out which teams count for a given night. To be ranked, a team must:

• Be playing one of our Standard games. Our Trivia Lite format is a lighter version and is not eligible for the rankings.
• Be playing under a registered team account. Guests are welcome to play, they just are not in the running for the season.
• Actually have shown up and played, meaning you submitted answers for at least half the rounds. This keeps walk-ins and half-played nights out of the rankings.

STEP 2: YOUR COMPARABLE SCORE

We add up your round scores into a single number we use only for lining teams up. Two adjustments happen here:

• We set aside the Lightning Round speed bonus. Submission times can vary from bar to bar, so we drop the speed bonus to get a true cross-bar comparison. You still keep every point for answering the Lightning questions correctly, just not the speed bonus on top.
• We apply the standard large-team penalty (minus 2 points per player over 8), the same rule as any normal Trivia Tycoon night.

This comparable score never becomes your points directly. Its only job is to decide who finished ahead of whom.

STEP 3: RANK IN THE FIELD

You are ranked against every eligible team that played those same questions that night, not just the teams at your own bar. We gather all the teams that played that night across all bars and sort that whole group by comparable score. So you might place 3rd at your bar but 12th out of everyone who played that night, and it is that overall placement that counts. We call the size of that full field N, and your position in it r (1 is first).

STEP 4: TURNING RANK INTO POINTS

This is the heart of it. First we ask what fraction of the field you beat. We call that your percentile, p:

If you came 8th out of 60, then p = (60 − 8) / (60 − 1) = 52 / 59 = 0.88. You finished ahead of 88% of the field. The winner beats everyone, so p = 1. Last place beats no one, so p = 0.

Then we turn that percentile into points with this curve:

Beat 88% of the field and you get 100 × 0.88² = 77 points. Here is how a full 60-team night shakes out:

Why percentiles, and not a fixed points table?

A fixed table (say, 100 for 1st, 95 for 2nd, and so on) would mean finishing 10th was worth the same whether 12 teams or 50 teams played that night, which is not fair. Because we use percentiles, beating 75% of the field is worth the same points on a night with 4 games as it is on a night with 10. Field size never helps or hurts you.

Why square it?

Squaring the percentile is a deliberate choice. It makes the top of the board steep and the middle gentle, so winning is worth a lot more than coasting in the middle. Compare the two:

Under a flat curve, a middle finish banks you more than half of a win, which over a season rewards just showing up over actually winning. Squaring fixes that: a win is worth roughly four times a middle finish. Since only the very top of the standings earns a Championship spot, we want the points to clearly separate the best teams, and the squared curve does that.

STEP 5: THE HOME-BAR BONUS

Everything above ranks you against the whole night's field. This is the one spot where your own bar matters on its own: a little extra for a top-three podium finish at your bar that night. If at least 4 teams played at your bar, the top 3 there earn a bonus on top of their points: +5 points for 1st, +3 points for 2nd, and +1 point for 3rd. It is a small nudge (your overall placement is still worth far more), but home-bar bragging rights should count for something.

What about ties?

Trivia produces a lot of ties, so we handle them in the fairest way: tied teams split the average of the spots they take up. If two teams tie for 1st, they each get the average of the 1st and 2nd place points. If three teams tie for the top bar bonus, they split 5, 3, and 1, which is 3 points each. Nobody gains or loses by sharing a spot, and no extra points get invented out of thin air.

STEP 6: BEST OF THE WEEK

Play more than one night in a week? Great, but only your single best result that week counts toward the season. Playing extra nights gives you more chances at a great result, never a way to stack points. A week runs Monday through Sunday.

STEP 7: YOUR SEASON TOTAL

The season is 13 weeks long, but we only count your best 10 of those 13 weeks. We add up your ten best weekly results, and the three worst weeks (including any weeks you missed, which count as zero) are simply dropped. That means you can sit out up to three weeks, or have a few off nights, with no harm to your standing. That sum is your season points, and it is what ranks you against everyone else on the leaderboard.

Same points, who ranks higher?

Any time two teams have the same season points, we settle the order in a fixed way: first, who won the most weeks outright (took 1st across the whole field that night, not just at their own bar); then their best week by points, then the next-best, and on down through each week's points until the tie breaks. This is how every spot on the leaderboard is decided, every week, so a tie is always settled the same, repeatable way.

THE FINALE

When the 13 weeks are done, the top 15 teams by season points are invited to the single-game Championship, where the actual title is decided.

ALL TOGETHER: ONE TEAM'S WEEK

A FEW TRADE-OFFS

Every ranking system makes trade-offs. Here are the ones worth knowing about.

Ranking depends on who else shows up. Because your points come from how you place, a night stacked with strong teams is a tougher night to do well on than a less competitive one. We think that is the right trade for keeping things fair from night to night, and it evens out as the season goes on and more teams play. The very best teams rise to the top in any field, and the season only needs to sort out that top group accurately. We watch the numbers each week, and if a real imbalance shows up we will revisit it for the next season.

We forgive off nights and missed weeks. Only your best night each week counts, and only your best 10 of 13 weeks count toward the season. So one rough night, or even a couple of weeks off, will not knock a good team out of contention.