Top 100 or top 1,000: why deep cutoffs behave differently
The winner of a cup and the team at rank 20 are usually not far apart in points. The team at rank 1,000 can be almost anywhere: close behind in a huge field, at a fraction of the top's score in a small one. The shape of the leaderboard – how points fall with rank – is what a deep cutoff depends on, and it is set above all by how many teams play.
The shape of a leaderboard
The chart takes rank 20 as the reference and shows what the other ranks are worth against it, for Battle Royale open queues of three sizes. Each line is the median over every harvested leaderboard of that size.
650–1,000 teams2,000–3,000 teams6,500–9,900 teams
The numbers behind the chart
| Rank (log scale) | 650–1,000 teams | 2,000–3,000 teams | 6,500–9,900 teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.27 | 1.30 | 1.28 |
| 5 | 1.11 | 1.14 | 1.12 |
| 10 | 1.06 | 1.06 | 1.06 |
| 25 | 0.98 | 0.98 | 0.98 |
| 50 | 0.90 | 0.92 | 0.92 |
| 100 | 0.78 | 0.85 | 0.87 |
| 250 | 0.56 | 0.73 | 0.79 |
| 500 | 0.30 | 0.60 | 0.71 |
| 1,000 | — | 0.41 | 0.62 |
| 2,500 | — | 0.04 | 0.42 |
Three things stand out:
- The top is the same everywhere. Whatever the field, the winner finishes about a quarter above rank 20, and rank 10 a few per cent above it.
- Rank 100 moves a little. It is worth 78% of rank 20 in a field of 650 to 1,000 teams and 87% in a field of 6,500 or more.
- Rank 500 and beyond depend on the field. Rank 500 is worth 30% of rank 20 in the small field, 60% in a field of 2,000 to 3,000 and 71% in the biggest; rank 1,000, 41% against 62%.
The reason is simple: what matters is not the rank but how deep into the field it is. Rank 1,000 of 1,100 teams is the bottom of the board, made of teams that played two or three games; rank 1,000 of 9,000 is the top ninth, made of teams that played the whole session well.
Why a curve is not enough
A natural idea is to fit one smooth curve, points against rank, and read any rank off it. The forecast did that at first, with a curve per band of field size, and out of sample it ran 9% low at rank 500 and 13% low at rank 1,000: two parameters cannot bend both ends of a ladder at once. It now reads the measured ladder – the medians charted above, in eleven bands of field size and per game mode – and keeps the curve only where too few leaderboards reach a rank. At the deep ranks the error of the shape roughly halved.
What field size does to a cutoff
- At the top, almost nothing. Doubling the number of teams moves the threshold at rank 20 by about 3.5%. A bigger field means a few more strong teams, not a different top.
- Deep, almost everything. The same rank 1,000 can be worth two fifths of rank 20 or three fifths depending on the field. When the number of teams is known, give it to the forecast: it moves the answer along the ladder.
- Percentage cuts follow the field. "Top 25% qualify" is rank 250 of 1,000 teams and rank 2,500 of 10,000. Such a cut is priced at the rank it lands on once the field is known, and the forecast says so when it has to assume a field.
Reading your own position
During a cup, the deep end of an open queue also runs on its own clock: the thousandth team of a field of two thousand is mostly done by the last fifth of the session, while the thousandth of ten thousand keeps pace with the top. The live forecast reads each rank's pace by how deep it is into the field for that reason, and how the cutoff moves during a cup explains the rest.
Updated 23 October 2026