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. A tougher question set drags everyone's raw score down together, but it does not change 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 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. That bonus rewards buzzing in fastest, and Brain Play is about what you know, not who has the quickest thumbs. You still keep all the points 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: YOUR RANK IN THE NIGHT'S FIELD

This is the part most people miss, so it is worth being blunt about: you are not just ranked against the teams at your own bar. We gather every eligible team that played those same questions that night, from every bar that ran them, and sort that whole group by comparable score. So you might place 3rd at your bar but 12th across the city, and it is that city-wide placement that counts. We will 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 showed up, which is not fair. Because we use percentiles, beating 75% of the room is worth the same points on a quiet Tuesday as it is on a packed Monday. 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.

The small-field adjustment

Winning a 3-team night should not be worth as much as winning a 60-team night. So if fewer than 8 teams in total played the night you played (counting every bar, not just yours), we scale the points down in proportion: a 4-team field counts for half, a 6-team field for three quarters, and so on. At 8 teams or more, you get full credit. In practice, once the season is rolling and lots of bars are playing the same night, the field is comfortably large and this rarely comes into play.

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 winning your home room. If at least 4 teams played at your bar, the top 3 there earn a bonus on top of their points: plus 5 for 1st, plus 3 for 2nd, and plus 1 for 3rd. It is a small nudge (your city-wide placement is still worth far more), but local 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: YOUR BEST NIGHT EACH 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 score, 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 score, and it is what ranks you against everyone else.

THE FINALE

When the 13 weeks are done, the top 15 teams by season score are invited to the one-night Championship, where the actual title is decided. If teams are tied at the cutoff, we break it with a clear, fixed order: most weeks won outright first, then highest single-week result, then the depth of your dropped weeks, and so on down the list. The cutoff is always decided the same, repeatable way.

ALL TOGETHER: ONE TEAM'S WEEK

A FEW HONEST NOTES

Every scoring 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 score well on than a quieter one. We think that is the right trade for keeping things fair across wildly different question difficulty, 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 reward knowledge, not speed. Setting aside the Lightning speed bonus is intentional. It keeps the rankings about what your team knows, so a slower but smarter team is never penalized for not having the fastest fingers.

We forgive bad weeks. Best of week, dropping your worst three, and counting only the top 10 of 13 all exist for the same reason: life happens, and one rough night or a missed week should not knock a good team out of contention.