Confidence

Confidence lets a participant say how sure they are about each pick, and scores that pick accordingly. Fanzava runs it two ways, and they are different games. Pick one when you set the competition up.

Mode	How a participant uses it	What a correct pick is worth
Multiplier	Rates each pick on a five-rung scale. Ratings can repeat as often as they like.	The pick’s points, scaled by the rung
Ladder	Ranks every fixture in the round from most confident to least, each rank used once.	The rank itself

Multiplier is the default. A competition that does not choose a mode runs multiplier, and every competition created before ladder mode existed keeps running exactly as it did.

Multiplier mode

Each pick carries one of five rungs:

Rung	Multiplier
Very low	0.5×
Low	0.75×
Medium	1.0×
High	1.5×
Very high	2.0×

Medium is the default, and it is deliberately the neutral rung: a participant who never touches the control is neither taxed nor subsidised.

The multiplier applies to a correct tip’s points. A wrong tip scores nothing, and rating it Very high does not make it cost more.

i

Note

The rungs and what they pay are fixed platform-wide. You can narrow how many rungs are offered in the competition’s advanced mechanics, but you cannot change what a rung is worth.

Ladder mode

The participant ranks every fixture in the round. In a nine-game round they use ranks 1 through 9, each exactly once, and a correct pick is worth its rank. Rank your surest thing 9, get it right, and it pays 9.

Four rules fall out of that:

• The ladder is a full permutation or nothing. A partial ladder is not a smaller ladder, so it is refused rather than saved in part. The whole ordering is submitted in one go.
• The rank range is the round’s size, not the participant’s. Somebody who tipped six of nine games still ranks against nine, so a short tipping list cannot buy a shorter ladder.
• An unranked pick scores zero, even when it is correct. Paying the pick’s base points instead would reward a participant who ignored the ladder more than one who ranked the same pick low.
• Ranks run up to 50, which is the largest round the ladder supports.

Byes and short rounds

A round with byes has fewer games, so its ladder tops out lower and is worth less in total. Turn on bye normalisation and give it a full-round size, and a short round is scaled to the same total as a full one.

Normalisation with no full-round size set does nothing, so set both together.

For the arithmetic of a ladder round by round, including how much a bye round shrinks it, see confidence pools explained.

How a ladder competition breaks a tie

In order: total points, then number of correct picks, then head to head on the highest rank that separates the two participants, then cumulative margin error, then recent form, and finally who joined first.

The head-to-head step is the interesting one. If you and I finish level, whoever was right about the game they backed hardest wins. It sits ahead of margin error on purpose: a ladder already asked each participant which games they were surest about, so that answer settles the tie before a margin does.

Participants the chain cannot separate share a rank, and the next rank skips (1, 2, 2, 4).

Choosing a mode

!

Warning

Set the mode before the competition starts. The two modes store their answer in the same place with different meanings, so a competition switched mid-season carries tips written under the old mode. Those tips hold no rank, which in ladder mode means they score nothing. Changing the mode writes a new ruleset version, and rounds already scored keep the rules they were scored under.

Multiplier suits a competition where people dip in and out: rate the games you care about, leave the rest neutral, and nothing is lost by not engaging with it.

Ladder suits a season-long competition with committed regulars. It rewards judgement about which games are readable rather than how many are, and it produces a much more separated leaderboard.

Setting it up

1. Admin → Competition → Advanced
2. Turn Confidence on
3. Choose Multiplier or Ladder
4. For ladder, optionally turn on bye normalisation and set the full-round size

Participants see the control on the tipping page: a per-pick rating in multiplier mode, and a rank-the-round card in ladder mode.