How leaderboard points are weighted

Leg 01Why a weighting is needed at all

A race field is not uniform. One player sits in high-stakes cash games and generates a large rake in a few hours; another plays hundreds of low-stakes tournaments and generates a similar total across weeks; a third plays rarely but at the highest buy-ins. To rank them you must decide what counts as "activity": the rake you contributed, the rake at your tables, the number of events you played, the stakes you played them at, or some combination. That decision is the weighting, and there is no neutral choice. Every method rewards one kind of player and quietly disadvantages another.

Leg 02Contributed rake: you are scored on what you generated

Under contributed-rake weighting, only the rake that your own play directly generated counts toward your score. It is the most transparent method: your points are a function of your activity and nothing else, and two players who play the same stakes for the same time score the same. It rewards volume and consistency, and it is indifferent to whether the player to your left is generating far more rake — that player is scored on their own contribution, not yours.

• Your rake only — your score reflects your own play
• Transparent — easy to verify against your own hand history
• Volume-favouring — the player who plays the most hours leads

Leg 03Dealt and average rake: a share of the table’s rake

Under dealt or average-rake weighting, the rake taken at your table is divided among the players seated there, whether or not you put money into each pot. A player who folds every hand still accrues points from the table’s rake under a dealt method. This spreads the score across everyone seated rather than rewarding the specific players who funded each pot, and it can dramatically favour a player who sits in big games without playing many hands.

Leg 04Volume points and stakes multipliers

A third family scores the act of playing rather than the rake itself: a fixed number of points per tournament played, sometimes multiplied by the buy-in tier. A stakes multiplier pushes the race toward the highest buy-ins — play a 500 event and score far more than a 5 event — while a flat points-per-tournament rule rewards sheer quantity and makes a race winnable by grinding the smallest events. Neither is more "correct"; they simply aim the race at different players.

Leg 05Caps and time decay: how races limit a runaway leader

Because a pure volume weighting lets a full-time grinder outscore everyone else by playing constantly, many races add a cap — a ceiling on how many points count per day or per period — or a time decay, where activity late in the period scores more so the leaderboard stays competitive to the end. Both are attempts to widen the set of players who can win. A cap hands the advantage back to skill-per-hour and away from raw volume; a decay makes the last week of the period matter more than the first.

• Daily cap
• Period cap
• Time decay
• Eligibility tiers

Leg 06Comparing two races honestly

Two races can advertise the same prize and crown opposite winners because their weightings differ. To compare them, put the weighting next to the prize distribution and the eligibility rules: contributed scoring with a steep curve favours committed regulars; dealt scoring with a broad payout favours players who sit in large games; a stakes multiplier favours the highest buy-ins; a cap levels the field. None of it is hidden — it is in the terms — but it is rarely stated in one place, which is exactly why reading it first is worthwhile.