How player levels work
Your level is one number, from 0.0 to 7.0, that says how good you are at padel. It is not your Ladder Rating and it has nothing to do with it: LR is a seasonal race that resets, and your level is a permanent answer to "how good is this person". It is the number a stranger looks at to decide whether a match with you would be a good one.
The tiers
| Tier | Level | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Rang 5 | 0.0 – 1.39 | Starting out. Learning to hold the racket, find the ball and stay out of your partner's way. |
| Rang 4 | 1.4 – 3.54 | Improver. You can keep a slow rally going and you have stopped being surprised by the back wall, but pace and direction are still happening to you rather than being chosen. |
| Rang 3 | 3.55 – 4.59 | Recreational regular. You know roughly where to stand, you return most ordinary balls, and you use the glass on purpose more often than by accident. |
| Rang 2 | 4.6 – 5.4 | Confident club player. You control direction and pace, you move as a pair, and you make far fewer unforced errors than you used to. |
| Rang 1 | 5.41 – 7.0 | Serious competitor. Tactically sharp, comfortable switching between defence and attack, and playing at tournament level. |
The tier is what people read; the number under it is what the algorithm actually works in; the percentage is how settled that number is. Until the percentage reaches 100% the badge says Calibrating in place of the tier name - the colour and the number stay, but the level is still moving.
One number, 0.0 to 7.0
Every assessed player sits somewhere on a scale from 0 to 7. It is worked out to two decimal places behind the scenes and shown to one, because the second decimal is what stops thirty matches' worth of tiny movements from rounding away to nothing - and showing it would only start arguments about hundredths. Your level is public. It appears on your profile and nowhere else: it is not a leaderboard, you cannot be ranked by it, and it never affects Ladder Rating, Quarter Points or any race in the app.
Where you start
When you join, you answer a short one-time questionnaire: how long you have played, how often you play, what other racket sports you have played, how much coaching you have had, and what you can actually do on a court - the back glass, the lob, the side walls, the bandeja, court positioning, whether you compete. Those answers place you on the scale immediately. They are an educated guess and nothing more, which is exactly why your first matches are allowed to move you a long way. The questionnaire will not place anybody at the very top of the scale: the last stretch is not something a form can establish, and it is reached by playing.
If you already have a Playtomic level
Say so, tell us the number, and attach a screenshot or a link to your profile. An admin checks it - usually within 24 hours - and then your level is set to the verified number. Until that happens you have no level at all, and your profile says so. That is deliberate: a level anybody can type in is worth nothing to everybody else, and a day without a badge is a much smaller problem than a scoreboard people stop believing. You can play in the meantime; those matches simply do not move a level you do not have yet.
Why your level jumps around at first
Behind every level is a confidence score based on how many ranked matches the system has watched you play. A brand-new level carries no confidence at all, so one match can move you by as much as 0.50 - winning your first match might send you up half a level, and losing it might take half a level off. After about 30 ranked matches the system considers the question settled, and the movements shrink to roughly 0.02 per match. This is the honeymoon phase working as intended: the first five to ten matches are the system finding out where you actually belong, and it has to be allowed to move you a long way to do that. Every profile shows this as a percentage under the tier. A low number means the level is still bouncing; 100% means it has settled.
Only the result counts
Winning 7-6, 6-7, 7-6 after two hours moves your level by exactly as much as winning 6-0, 6-0. Games won, points, who hit the most winners: none of it is looked at. This is on purpose. The scoreline says a lot about a match and very little about a player, and counting it would reward running up the score against people you have already beaten. You won, or you did not.
Who you played, and who with
Your team's level is the average of the two of you, and it is compared against the average of the pair on the other side. Beating a stronger pair is worth several times more than beating an equal one; losing to a much stronger pair costs you almost nothing, because you were expected to. That average is also what rewards carrying a weaker partner. If you and a much lower-rated partner beat two strong players, your side was the underdog on paper and you are paid accordingly - the system cannot see who hit which ball, but it can see what your side was expected to do and what it actually did.
Nothing counts until the result is confirmed
A level moves only when a RANKED match has been reported and confirmed by the other team. A friendly moves nothing at all, and a result nobody confirms moves nothing either. You will not see anything about your level before a match or after it - no prediction, no gain, no loss, no notification. Go and look at your own profile when you want to know: every movement is listed there with the date, the opposing team's level and the exact change. A number that flashed up at the end of every match would turn into something people play for instead of playing.
Why a closed group plateaus
Between players the system knows equally well, a match is zero-sum: whatever the winners gain, the losers lose. No level is created. So if the same four friends play every Tuesday and nobody else, no new skill ever enters that group. One pair wins this week and takes a little from the other; the other pair wins next week and takes it back. Everybody's number sits still - even if all four of them are genuinely improving at the same rate, because the algorithm can only ever see them relative to each other. There is no trick to this and we are not going to pretend otherwise: the way out is to play people outside your usual four. That is what gives the system something new to measure you against.
This is not your Ladder Rating
They share nothing. Not a table, not a column, not a formula. Ladder Rating resets every season, starts everybody on the same number, rewards the margin of victory, and decides where you sit on the city ladder and how many Quarter Points you take. Your level never resets, ignores the scoreline entirely, and ranks you against nobody. Changing one does not change the other, and an admin correcting one leaves the other exactly where it was.
Looking for how Ladder Rating and the ladders work instead? Read that here