Ladders Basics

Ladders are a great way to find competitive matches on the site. They can be thought of as a “King of the Hill” ongoing tournament. Once you join a ladder you start at the very bottom and try to work your way to the top by challenging players above you. There are 3 site-wide ladders, one for each board size: 19x19, 13x13, and 9x9. All ladders are without handicap stones (even games) and have the same correspondence time control settings: Fischer with 3 day start time, 1 day increment and a max of 3 days.

It is good to realise that the ladder itself is only a bookkeeping tool. The games are separate from the ladder list and located where all the other games are: in Game space, with its own addresses.

Ladders are presented under the Play section:

(experimental navigation)

When clicking on Ladders a condensed view of the three ladders (19 x 19, 13 x 13 & 9 x 9) are shown.

(normal navigation)

You can join any of the site ladders by clicking on the "Join" button underneath the ladder you want to join.

Who can you challenge in a ladder?

Anyone who has a fancy to play correspondence games, with rules and time setting as mentioned above, can join a ladder. If you do, you will start at the bottom of the ladder. You can challenge someone by clicking on their username.

You can challenge players higher than you on the ladder, subject to the following limits:

• 10 positions higher than you: you can challenge anyone up to 10 positions above you.
• 40% of the players above your position (e.g. if you are 100th, you could challenge the player in 60th place on the ladder). Players on positions out of your reach (in faded grey mode) can't be challenged.
• 5 positions lower than where you would be if the ladder was sorted by rating (e.g. if you are the 7th highest-rated player in the ladder, you could challenge for 12th place, even though you are at the bottom of the ladder.)

Players have a limited number of incoming challenges at a time. You cannot challenge someone if they have already have been challenged by too many other players.

• 1st to 5th place: 5 incoming challenges max
• 6th to 10th place: 4 incoming challenges max
• 11th place and below: 3 incoming challenges max

In order to keep the ladder dynamic and the competitive spirit alive, you are not allowed to challenge someone again within 7 days of finishing your last game against them. This is to prevent that ladder players "cluster together" and block the ladder rotation. Therefore, you also may have only one active challenge per opponent.

What happens when you challenge someone in a ladder?

Ladder challenges are automatically accepted by the person you are challenging. Likewise, anytime another user challenges you the challenge will be automatically accepted. You will receive a notification when this happens.

Withdrawing from a Ladder

Withdrawing from a ladder will not automatically resign you from any ladder games you are playing. If a person you were playing withdraws from the ladder, then your game becomes a normal game and will not count towards ladder position.

If you do want to have a pause in your ladder activities but do not want to withdraw from it, you can consider putting on vacation mode (profile settings).

Timing out in a Ladder

If you time out in a ladder game, you will be automatically removed from the ladder. Any other ladder games you are playing will continue as normal games. If you wish to rejoin the ladder, you must do so from the bottom.

However, a reprieve is offered. If you rejoin the ladder and then win a challenge you were previously playing, then you will jump up to the new position.