LD Rankings

The following are rankings for the Lincoln Douglas circuit for the 2025-26 season. The algorithm used to generate these rankings is a slightly modified version of the Glicko-2 rating system which is used by chess.com and CS:GO among others.

The code is all open source.

Topic sub-rankings:

• Plea Bargaining (Sep-Oct)
• Rewilding (Nov-Dec)
• Nuclear Weapons (Jan-Feb)

There are two modifications to note:

Majors

Rounds at major tournaments are ran twice instead of once, as all other rounds are. We feel that performance at a major more accurately reflects a debater’s skill level given a robust judging pool and debaters putting in their best effort. The “purpose,” if any, of this ranking system is to identify debaters expected to perform well at the TOC, so majors serve as a better proxy.

For our purposes, the following are the “major” tournaments so far:

• Heart of Texas
• The Glenbrooks
• Greenhill
• Harvard Westlake
• Emory
• Harvard
• Berkeley
• NDCA

The decision to denote these as majors was based on many factors, including but not limited to quality of competition and quality of judging pool.

Rating Calculation

The rating displayed and used for rankings is a variance-discounted version of the actual rating score calculated by the Glicko-2 algorithm. Glicko-2 provides two scores for each player, a rating and a deviation / volatility score. The volatility score scales inversely with the number of matches a player has played, serving to proxy how erratic the player’s performance is expected to be.

In practical terms, this means that debaters who attend few tournaments will have higher volatility scores because their performance hasn’t been tested over a large dataset of matches.

The adjusted rating is calculated as follows

Rankings