If you have ever shown up to a doubles game and immediately realised you were either coaching three beginners or scrambling to keep up with three competitive players, you already understand why Padelya cares about levels.
The wrong level mismatch ruins a game. The beginner does not improve because the rallies last one shot. The strong players are not challenged. Everyone leaves with a worse experience than they would have had with friends. We could pick any number to label players — 1 to 5, beginner to advanced, novice to elite — but every shorthand collapses real differences in skill into the same bucket. So we picked Glicko.
What Glicko is
Glicko is a rating system originally designed for chess by Mark Glickman. It does two things that simple labels do not. First, it gives you a numerical rating that updates after every match — points up when you beat someone stronger, points down when you lose to someone weaker. Second, it tracks how confident the system is in your rating. A player who has played five matches has a wide uncertainty band; a player who has played fifty has a tight one. The system uses both numbers to decide how much your rating should move.
Most "ranking" systems online are basically Elo, which Glicko is a refinement of. Glicko's improvement is the confidence band — it stops the system from over-correcting on small samples and helps new players settle into their true level faster.
How Padelya uses it
Every confirmed match on Padelya updates a player's Glicko rating. We map the rating range onto five visible bands so you do not have to read a number to know who you are paired with:
- Level 0 — learning the rules and rallying. Glicko 0 to 1.5.
- Level 1 — confident rallies, casual play. Glicko 1.5 to 3.
- Level 2 — regular partners, established routine. Glicko 3 to 4.5.
- Level 3 — competitive, club-tier results. Glicko 4.5 to 6.
- Level 4 — federation ranking or pro level. Glicko 6 to 7.
Open matches let the host set a level band — say, 2.0 to 2.5 — and players outside the band cannot join. That keeps the experience honest for both sides: the host gets the level of game they wanted, and the joiner is not embarrassed by being out-classed.
Why we did not just use 1 to 5
We thought about it. The advantage of a five-bucket label is simplicity — you self-rate, you join games at your bucket, done. The disadvantage is that "level 2" hides a huge range. A player who just crossed into level 2 plays differently from one who is about to graduate to level 3. With a numeric rating underneath the label, we can let level-2 hosts set narrow bands ("level 2 only, please, no overlap with level 1 or 3") or wide ones ("any level 2 or 3 welcome"), so the same five-bucket UI maps onto a much richer reality.
The numeric rating also handles bad matches gracefully. If a level-3 player has a few rough nights and slides into the high level-2 territory, the rating drops, and the player's open-match invitations adjust. No appeals, no manual moderation, no "I think I'm a 3 but the system labelled me a 2".
What you should not read into your rating
Two things to keep in mind. First, the rating is for matchmaking, not a leaderboard — we do not show city-wide rankings because that would invite people to optimise for the rating rather than for a good game. Second, the confidence band matters. If you have played three matches your rating is mostly uncertainty; do not be discouraged when it bounces around for a while. After ten or fifteen matches it stabilises and tends to be a sharper picture of where you actually are than your own self-perception.
If you ever feel like the system is mis-rating you, head to the help center and write to us. The model is not magic and we would rather hear about a real edge case than have you grumble at a number on screen.
Now go play. The rating updates whether or not you are watching it.