Board Game Arena

Is there any information somewhere about how and how much ELO is awarded? I want to understand in which cases you get 3 ELO and in which you get 17. What does it depend on?

Tatjana-Lisa wrote: ↑05 February 2026, 09:22 Is there any information somewhere about how and how much ELO is awarded? I want to understand in which cases you get 3 ELO and in which you get 17. What does it depend on?

BGA, like many sites on the internet, has an FAQ:
How does the ELO change calculation work?
How is my ELO updated?

I mention that because you didn't say "I read the FAQ about ELO and I have more questions about what it said." So I apologize if I'm incorrectly assuming you didn't already go to the part of the site specifically designed to answer frequently asked questions.

Unfortunately, in a revision to the FAQ they removed the explanation of how K-factor works on BGA. It used to explain that:

K, the 'elasticity factor,' has a value that depends on the number of games you have played: 60 for your first 10 games, 40 between your 11th and 20th games, 20 for your 21st onwards.

A person with a K-factor of 60 will gain (or lose) three times as many points as someone with the same rating who has already finished a game 20 or more times.

If that is still not enough, the deeper explanation gets more mathy, and you can read the Wikipedia article about Elo calculations.

You can even search for "Elo calculator" and play around with inputting numbers from one of your games to see that the numbers match the ELO Variation BGA calculates. Remember that BGA will round to a whole number, so to see the real numbers you have to mouseover the blue and white Elo number on a game result page like this https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=[table_number]

I think earning 23 elo points having the double ELO (200+) of the looser is totally wrong and unfair. This ELO calculation is a fraud!

Elo calculations are based on differences, not on ratios. So "double" means nothing relevant.

Scodazzi wrote: ↑09 March 2026, 15:57 I think earning 23 elo points having the double ELO (200+) of the looser is totally wrong and unfair. This ELO calculation is a fraud!

You lost to a beginner of that game on BGA. They still have a high k-factor because they've barely played any games of that particular game and are moving to their correct rating as they move through the fluff.