The Divisions

The Divisions, alongside the XP Leaderboard (see previous chapter), are Poker Spin Tracker's second ranking mode.

They work on the same foundations, with three differences: each week you are placed in a Division with players of your level (every week you can go down, stay put, or move up a Division), less randomness in the score calculation, and a weekly reset of your score to zero.

The Divisions follow a calendar in Paris time:

The Division score is deliberately simpler than the XP Leaderboard's: no flames, no random factor. Only two components, multiplied together Spin by Spin:

• EV: quite simply the EV you achieved during that Spin (as a reminder, that is the chips won corrected for luck on all-ins and multipliers, just like the CEV).
• Buy-in score: the same multiplier as for XP (×1 for €1, up to ×3.5 for €50+). It puts every caliber on the same scale.

Your final score for the week is the sum of all your eligible Spins.

Rather than a single worldwide leaderboard as is the case for the XP Leaderboard, you are placed in a Division with players of your level. Eight Divisions exist; here they are, from the lowest to the highest:

To avoid having hundreds of players side by side in each Division, which would make things hard to read, the Divisions are themselves split into groups of about ten players.

To learn more about this split into groups of about ten players, you can expand the explanation below. Understanding how it works is not absolutely essential; you can also choose to skip straight to what follows.

At the end of each week (Sunday 21:00), an algorithm looks at the standings of each group and applies three rules:

• Players at the top of the group are promoted to the Division above.
• Players at the bottom of the group are relegated to the Division below.
• Players in the middle are maintained in the same Division.

Promotion and relegation rates are not fixed: they adjust every week to keep a healthy pyramid (see below). An overcrowded Division promotes more, a Division that is too small promotes less. The ballpark figures are ~25% promoted and ~20% relegated per group under normal conditions.

If you skip a week

The first time you import in the new week, you are automatically placed in your Division from the previous week (or the Division above if you had been promoted, the one below if you had been relegated).

If you skip several weeks, it is your last known result that serves as the starting point.

The number of players per Division follows a target shape: a pyramid.

Bronze gathers the most people, and each Division above holds fewer and fewer of the chosen, all the way up to Mythic.

The goal is to reproduce the structure of esports leaderboards (League of Legends, Valorant, Apex…): lots of players at the bottom, fewer and fewer as you climb, and high Divisions that stay rare by design.

The tracker currently runs on a 0.8 ratio: each Division targets 80% of the population of the one below. The higher you go, the scarcer the spots become, but without extreme gaps. Here is what that looks like depending on the total population:

What comes next

The 0.8 ratio was chosen for the launch phase: it opens the high Divisions quickly and lets you see people climbing. Once Mythic is properly populated, the ratio will gradually be lowered to tighten the pyramid and make the top Divisions rarer, and therefore more prestigious.

To give a sense of scale, here is the same population of 1,000 players distributed with increasingly aggressive ratios: