There is no single official world ranking for Rock Paper Scissors. No international sports federation governs the game, so any ranking you see is kept by a particular organization or website and covers only the games it records, including ours.
Older articles on this site described ranking committees, controversies and "world number ones" that did not exist. This page replaces them with what is actually true: who has ranked players, how a rating system can work for a game like this, and precisely how the WRPSA rankings are calculated.
Who has ranked RPS players
Historically, the organizations that ran championships named champions rather than maintaining a continuous ranking. The World RPS Society held an annual championship in Toronto from 2002, and the USA Rock Paper Scissors League held national championships in Las Vegas from 2006. Both are defunct. Their winners are covered in our champions article.
A championship title tells you who won one event. A rating tells you how someone performs over many games. For a game with as much luck per throw as RPS, the second is far more informative.
How an Elo rating works
Most online game rankings, including ours, use a version of the Elo system, originally designed for chess:
- Every player starts at the same number.
- Before a match, the difference in ratings gives each player an expected score. Beat someone rated far above you and you gain a lot; beat someone far below you and you gain little.
- After the match, your rating moves by a fixed factor (K) times the gap between your actual result and your expected result.
Because the adjustments are zero-sum between the two players, ratings settle where players' results say they belong.
How WRPSA rankings are calculated
This is the policy running on wrpsa.com today, called canonical-elo-v2:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Starting rating | 1200 |
| K factor | 32 |
| Rounding | Whole numbers |
| Floor | 0 (a rating cannot go negative) |
| Match weight | 1 for standard eligible matches, 0.5 for king-of-court |
| Provisional | Fewer than 30 active rated results |
| Inactive | No eligible rated result in 90 days |
A few details that matter:
- Only rated matches between registered members count. Games against the computer do not affect your rating. A player appears on the leaderboard only after a rated match has been settled.
- Ordering. Players are sorted by rating, then by the number of rated results, then username.
- Provisional is a label, not a penalty. It tells you the rating rests on little evidence. Elo v2 does not compute a statistical confidence interval, so we don't claim one.
- Corrections. If a result is reviewed and replaced, the old rating change is reversed before the new one is applied.
- Prediction check. Once there are at least 50 settled rated matches, the rankings page publishes a Brier score measuring how well ratings predicted results. Lower is better.
The full methodology is published in machine-readable form at /api/leaderboard/methodology, linked from the rankings page.
Do rankings measure skill in RPS?
Partly, and it is fair to be skeptical. Against a perfectly random opponent, no strategy wins more than a third of throws on average, so ratings between two random players would just drift. But people are not random. Research such as Wang, Xu and Zhou's 2014 Zhejiang University study found that players tend to repeat winning throws and switch after losing, and our own data shows clear biases (see our strategy page). A player who spots and exploits those habits should win more than chance, and over enough games a rating will show it.
That is why the provisional threshold exists. Across a handful of matches, luck dominates. Across dozens, patterns start to show.
How to get ranked
- Create a free account.
- Play rated matches against other members.
- After your first settled rated match you appear on the leaderboard, marked provisional until you reach 30 results.
FAQ
Who is the world's number one Rock Paper Scissors player?
There is no official answer, because there is no official world ranking. Our leaderboard shows the top-rated player among WRPSA members only.
Does playing the computer improve my ranking?
No. Only rated matches between registered members count.
Why does my rating say provisional?
You have fewer than 30 active rated results. The label drops off as you play more.