Guides

How many points do you need to qualify in a Fortnite cup?

There is no single number, and anyone who quotes one without naming the cup, the region and the rank is guessing. But the cutoff is far from random: a cup's threshold at a given rank moves only a few per cent from one week to the next, and the few things that move it can be measured. This guide goes through them, with the numbers from 8,116 tournaments.

Five things set the cutoff

The scoring table. Every cup publishes how many points each placement is worth and how many an elimination adds. A Victory Cup that pays 60 for a win and 2 per elimination and an FNCS session that pays 65 for a win are not on the same scale, so a "good score" in one says little about the other. The scoring guide goes through the common tables.

The number of games. Points add up game after game, so a ten-game session simply produces bigger numbers than a six-game one. In most solo, duo and trio formats the team at rank 20 finishes with between two fifths and a little over half of the most a team could possibly have scored over the session – a share far steadier than the raw points.

The size of the field. Rank 1,000 is the middle of the board when 2,000 teams play and the very bottom when 1,100 do. Near the top the field barely matters – doubling the number of teams moves the threshold at rank 20 by about 3.5% – but deep in the board it decides almost everything. The guide to deep ranks shows by how much.

The rank of the cut. "Top 100 qualify" and "top 2,500 qualify" are two different questions. The drop from one to the other depends on the field and the game mode, not on a fixed rule of thumb.

The region, the format and the season. The same cup is cheaper in regions with smaller fields, especially far down the board (see regions compared). Zero Build, Reload and Battle Royale have their own ladders. And a new season can lift or lower every cup at once – by more than a third at the start of one season, by a tenth downwards at another (see what a new season does).

Last week is the best single guide

Most cups run every week or every few days, under the same table, in the same region. The single most useful number is therefore what the same rank took in the previous edition. On the newest 600 tournaments, each forecast only from what had finished before its day:

• carrying the previous edition's threshold forward was 4.2% off in median;
• the median of every edition of the cup's category was 5.3% off;
• the forecast this site publishes, which starts from the previous edition and corrects it, was 3.9% off.

The corrections are what the previous edition cannot know by itself: the recent editions played the same way are averaged, the latest weighing most, so one team's great night does not set next week's number; a field that is bigger or smaller than last time moves the threshold along the measured ladder; a change of who may enter (a cup opening to lower ranks, for instance) reads the last edition with the same entry bar; and a change of season applies the shift the first cups of the new season showed.

This season's most played cups in Europe

The table below is the reading the model starts from for this season's most played cups in Europe: the threshold at each rank over the recent editions played the same way, the latest counting most. It is not a forecast of the next edition – the forecast adds the corrections above – but it is the right order of magnitude to have in mind before you queue.

Points at the end of the session. A dash means the edition did not reach that deep, or the field is smaller than that rank.

Reading a forecast

Each forecast on this site is a number and a range. The number is the model's best estimate of the final threshold at that rank. The range is measured, not assumed: on past cups, the stated share of final thresholds landed inside it. When the forecast rests on a cup's own recent editions, the range is narrow; when the cup is new, or the season has just changed, it widens, and it is honest to read the whole range rather than the middle.

During the cup the forecast changes: the live standings are read every few minutes and weighed against the history, and the range narrows as the session goes. How the cutoff moves during a cup explains what the board is worth at each point of the evening.

Turning a cutoff into a plan

A cutoff is most useful divided by the games you have. A cut of 250 points over ten games is 25 points a game on average; under the FNCS table (32 points for tenth place, 22 for fifteenth, 2 per elimination) that is roughly a top-fifteen finish with two eliminations, every game – or a few very good games and some quiet ones. Three habits help:

1. Know the cut before the first game. Check the cup's rules for how many teams go through and look the rank up in the forecast. The list of this week's cups already prices the qualifying rank of each.
2. Do not read the early board literally. After a third of the session the threshold at your rank is typically 30% of its final value, and cups differ a lot at that point. Compare your total with the forecast for the end, not with the board.
3. Use the last hour. In a three-hour open queue about a third of the final threshold is still to be scored when the last hour starts, and the last games land up to twenty minutes after the window closes.

Open the forecast

Updated 23 October 2026