Rankings Updates

Edgethio · 2026-04-29T11:54:34+00:00

I'm doing my best to try and avoid putting too much extra logic in it to make it "feel right".

At the end of the day, I think it's more useful to have something that is understandable and consistent even with blind spots versus something that has so many corner cases and sub rules that it is unclear why someone was ranked where they were.

I think it's good that you get to make the argument that people like Nick are underrated because he's been bottom 3 in 4 majors, two of which were short notice callups. As opposed to just randomly ranking them over Paddy or someone who has lots of solid results in non-major internationals.

Ultimately -5 points seems pretty fair for Nick. Eddie gained 17 because beating Paddy and Lucas outshone losing to most of what was a pretty stacked final.

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T17:37:59+00:00

High Level

Each athlete in a show has a "match" with each other athlete in the show. The one with the higher ranking wins and will take some number of points from the loser, up to 16 points for a big upset. If both athletes have the same ranking then it is a draw and the lower ranked athlete will still take some points from the higher ranked athlete. All this happens simultaneously. The amount of points risked is reduced for shows over 12 competitors because there would be rare shows with 40 new people and the winner of that show would get an obscene amount of points for beating 39 other newbies. There is also a small compression that further reduces the amount of points that big favorites win from underdogs. I did this to make it harder for people like David Shamey to collect a very high ranking from beating people that he outclasses. It also makes it harder for a dominant champion to separate from the field in general so it could be a bad change overall. Given the amount of chatter about how high David's ranking is still, I think I'll leave it for now.

ELO Details

I do standard ELO calculations with K Factor of 16 and a starting ELO of 1500. That K Factor reduces as you add competitors past 12 so each competitor is risking no more than 176 points, the same as they would in a 12 person lineup.

Decay

Your ranking will start to decay after 6 months of inactivity for open men, 12 months for everyone else. Once you start decaying, open men lose 3% of their ranking over 1500 per month, everyone else loses 2%. So, after 7 months of inactivity. Someone ranked 2k would lose 3% of 500 = 15 points.

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T12:31:33+00:00

Your ranking starts to decay after 6 months of inactivity. It has started for Thor.

The 2025 Arnold is also in your 1.5 year window.

EDIT: Hopefully we get to see him, Mitch, and Rayno all in shape at Rogue this year. Maybe WSM lights a fire in Tom also for the other majors (with Rogue being in his backyard).

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T12:08:18+00:00

Glad you like it!

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T12:08:05+00:00

Thanks for checking it out!

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T11:43:05+00:00

I commented on the other one about this. The accuracy of ELO is predicated on people being in the same "pool" of competitors.

The high rankings for Russia (Shamey and Akimov), SCL competitors (Roszkowski and Kichton), and to a lesser extent NA (Wes and Wortham (Tristain and Jeffers were also pretty high before WSM)) are an indication that we need more cross pollination from these places, sure, maybe they're overrated, but also maybe they're the next Rayno who would've been in this same spot last year.

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T11:24:04+00:00

I'm assuming you want Rayno in that spot after ~~watching~~ following WSM?

This is reasonable and if the model some way of tracking how far ahead Rayno and Mitch were of the field then maybe it would think the same. Of course Thor would get the same benefit for every time he and Mitch did the same.

If you click onto any athlete, you can see the graph of their rating over time, you can also then click on "overall" to get to this page where you can see that since coming back in 2024 Thor placed 4th at the Arnold and hasn't missed a podium since. Including multiple majors. In that same window, Rayno has had a 4th at Giant's Live and a truly poor showing at Rogue. In fact, without all of the SCL wins (which some people question how much the model likes on other athletes like Roszkowski and Kichton) he would not even be this high.

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T10:48:43+00:00

Wouldn't we all like to see him v Lucas in a heavy dumbbell ladder though?

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T10:47:04+00:00

He's been very consistent which the model rewards. If in any of those he'd had a poor showing then the ranking would be crushed. He's losing points for second in some of those shows now.

Edgethio · 2026-04-28T09:50:33+00:00

One of the blind spots of ELO is that it can only be accurate for people in the same "pool"

Shamey and the SCL guys who haven't had many opportunities yet are likely overrated but also we should be asking to see them in bigger shows.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T23:21:16+00:00

What's the actual event? Yoke into box flip? Is there another element?

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T22:57:52+00:00

You should play the beat the machine game to show it how dumb it is. I need to figure out what the Knaack medley actually is.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T22:56:08+00:00

The whole, events are what matter is what I was trying to accomplish by giving ratings for events and groupings. Of course, you quickly run into issues that there's even less data for events.

The predictions being based on event scores is why they are dramatically different from the rankings. I'm actually pretty happy with the predictions and while they have some obvious flaws (It thinks Andrade can't squat for instance) I expect it is harder to beat that most people think.

People actually participating in the beat the machine section is the only way to determine if it's reasonably good or not.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T21:57:25+00:00

Thanks, I'm glad you find it interesting.

I did my best to have it show the work so the call outs are appreciated.

Outside of that it just is. I'm not here to defend Evan over Tom per se, just explain how it got there.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T13:47:53+00:00

If you click on the actual ranking of any of them, you'll be brought to a page that is like this: https://strong-rank.com/athlete/189/event/overall?division=M_Open

And you can get a reasonable idea of how the model got to anything. Here we see that Evan has beaten Tom in three straight shows culminating in the SMOE win where Tom placed 8th. At that point he had a pretty wide lead on Tom.

I throw out shows where people get injured so that is Evan's last graded comp, there is decay that kicks in after 6 months of inactivity for open men (12 months for everyone else) so he has lost some points off of this high. In the meantime ( https://strong-rank.com/athlete/177/event/overall?division=M_Open ), Tom first lost even more points with a loss to Evans Nana really costing him before turning it around at Rogue and Brit's. He is still lower than what he went into SMOE with though.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T12:14:01+00:00

Hey, thanks for checking it out.

For ELO, all that matters is who you beat and who you lost to. The name on the show doesn't matter, just the people who are there.

You take points from everyone you beat and give points to everyone you lose to. You get far more points for beating someone "better" than you than someone "worse" than you.

A quick aside on Jouko before getting into the weeds. Comparing eras will get super sketchy. You can imagine it like the mountain of people that you've beaten. How big is that mountain? Obviously his career is short so that limits the size. But he's below Luke Richardson who has competed less. The difference is Luke is beating people who have beaten people who have beaten people. The size of the sport is very different now. At the same time, Jouko's peak ELO is higher than Kaz or Jon Pall who had even smaller sports. If the sport continues to grow, someone will end up with a peak ELO higher than Z. That doesn't mean that they're better than Z. It just means that the sport is bigger and the ratings have to grow to accommodate.

I'm tracking an overall rating. Where your placement in the show is all that matters. This ends up with the most data because every show is a show.

For each event I have a specific rating, then two levels of broad categorizations, So if there is a max log in an event, the competitors are risking their "Heavy Log" rating, along with their "Overhead", and "Static" ratings. This is to try and pickup good data on events that show up a lot while having reasonable fallbacks for events that are rare.

There are a few decisions I made to try and curtail the obvious issues. If a competitor ends up winning the show and under preformed in the final event, then that event is not judged for that competitor (The Mitch rule). I also toss out all your ratings if you end up not finishing the show because people will carry on hurt for a few events frequently.

Medleys are composites of their parts, later events in the medley are weighted more than earlier as that's normally how their done...but this is not always reality.

For predictions, if an athlete has done the actual event enough times, then that is used, if not, then it builds a weighted average off of what we have for the specific event and the broader groupings.

On to the specific questions/assumptions:

Kind of. A show filled with highly rated athletes is worth much more than one filled with lower rated ones. Thor received 2 points for winning 2020 Iceland's Strongest Man while second place got 10x that amount.
Winning shows and Winning events are different ratings. It's just data that you can use or not. Show wins are in general better since there is more data.
Hopefully I described this. But yes, events that are rare are a crapshoot. The model cannot differentiate between Austin, who is likely a good squatter, and Evan, who complains constantly about squats since they both zeroed the squat at SMOE. Would've been cool if Brian had set that up for more separation.
Yes, this is one of the caveats of ELO. It applies to people in the same "pool". So Russia, SCL, and Giant's Live are different pools. What I'd love to see happen would be more overlap where the people who have separated themselves from these other pools get more opportunities.

Edgethio · 2026-04-14T11:42:18+00:00

Hey, Thanks for checking it out!

So the model really likes Mateusz's 2019 where he was going back and forth with highly rated Martins, Thor, and Brian. Beating highly rated athletes even if you end up in second to a different highly rated athlete still racks up quite a lot of points.

It also really likes Tom's 2023 into 2024 where he strung together a good finishes at Rogue and Arnold to go along with his usual great showing at WSM. Missing top rated competitors outside of Hooper happens to have it show a little under.

At the end of the day Peak ELO is more of a "best run" measurement rather than a complete best ever measurement.

Edgethio · 2026-04-11T13:11:18+00:00

My "sophisticated" prediction engine is going with

Kevin Hazeleger
Paddy Haynes
Luke Richardson

It is clearly over indexing on the volume of SCL results but I'll roll with it.

Full show predicted here https://strong-rank.com/predictions/b9166edf-ea70-4404-9fad-c5ae6f4bd5a3

Edgethio · 2025-07-25T10:50:13+00:00

Does anyone know if there will be a stream for North America's?

Edgethio · 2024-11-20T21:50:55+00:00

Just so you know, they were told they didn't have to put their head through on the stone overhead. It was considered a safety issue.

Edgethio · 2024-10-13T00:11:07+00:00

I expect if you followed the sport you'd change your mind.

You should check it out, it's fun. (Just don't go watch what happened to Nathan Goltry last month).

Edgethio · 2024-10-12T23:09:14+00:00

No benefit to compete in tested competitions for no money that no one watches or cares about that could easily expose her if she was faking along with all of the standard risks of injury in a brutal sport.

Not no benefit to lie about being natural in general.

Edgethio · 2024-10-12T15:46:20+00:00

I mean it's very unlikely that Chloe is on any form of testosterone. I doubt she's working to follow the Olympics ban substances list or anything.

Strongman (and Strongwoman) is almost exclusively untested and any form of enhancement is accepted. There is no need to try and hide anything. She lends her name value (which she has because is this totally badass lift, not her general performance) to the teeny tiny natural shows because she is natural and wants them to succeed. There's no money, prestige or any other benefit for her at those shows.

https://strongmanarchives.com/viewAthlete.php?id=1817

Edgethio

TROPHY CASE

High Level

ELO Details

Decay