Right, let's talk about the number.
You know the one. It's sat there next to your name every time you book a court, and if you're anything like most of the players I coach, you've spent more time thinking about it than you'd like to admit. Went up 0.1 after a good weekend? Delighted. Dropped after one bad match with a mate who turned up hungover? Personal crisis.
I get it. I've had players walk onto the court practically apologising for their rating before we've even hit a ball. So let's clear something up, because I think a lot of people have been sold the wrong idea about what that number is actually for.
What Playtomic is actually doing
Underneath it all, Playtomic runs on the same kind of maths chess rankings use, an ELO system, if you want the technical term. You answer a few questions when you sign up, it gives you a starting number, and from there it just watches your results. Win, the number nudges up. Lose, it nudges down. Beat someone better than you and it moves more than if you beat someone weaker. Simple enough.
There's also a reliability percentage running quietly in the background, and this bit matters more than people realise. Early on, with only a handful of matches recorded, your level can swing by half a point or more without much meaning. It only settles down once you've played a proper number of competitive matches. So if you're newish and your number's been bouncing about, that's not you being inconsistent. That's just the system still working out where you sit.
And look, for what it's built to do, it does it well. It's a matchmaking tool. It gets you into a game with people roughly your standard so nobody's having a miserable time. That's genuinely useful. I'm not here to tell you to delete the app.
But here's the thing it can't do
Playtomic has never once watched you play. It knows the scoreline. It doesn't know that you won that point because you finally nailed the bandeja we'd been working on, or that you scraped it home off a net cord and got away with murder.
A few things I see time and again that the rating just can't account for:
It can't see your technique. Grip, footwork, whether your swing's got a hitch in it that's going to cap you at a certain level no matter how many matches you play. None of that shows up as a number. It only sees who won.
Your partner is dragging your number around, in both directions. Padel's doubles. You're one of four people on that court. Play a few sessions with a strong partner carrying you and your rating creeps up without your game actually changing much. Happens the other way just as often, and I've seen good players undersold by a rough patch of partners.
It can be gamed, sometimes without anyone meaning to. There's plenty of chat online about players stacking easier matches to pad their number, and yes, that happens. But you don't need to be doing it on purpose. If you're mostly playing the same small friend group rather than a proper mix of opponents, your rating drifts in ways that don't reflect much beyond who you happen to play with.
Different apps, different numbers, and they don't agree with each other. Playtomic, MATCHi, LTA: they all use their own scales and their own methods, and none of them line up neatly. If your rating isn't even consistent across two apps, it was never really built to be a precise verdict on your game.
None of this is a Playtomic-bashing exercise. It's just not what it was ever built for, and I think that's the bit that gets lost.
What I'm actually looking at when I assess you
When someone comes to me for an assessment, I'm not interested in your win-loss record. I want to know why you're winning or losing, because that's the bit that actually tells us what to work on.
That means I'm watching:
How you actually move and hit the ball: grip, swing, footwork, and whether there's a habit sitting in there that's going to hold you back if we don't sort it now rather than later
What's actually in your toolkit. Not just whether you can produce a vibora once when you're relaxed and warmed up, but whether it's still there when it matters, three games in, under a bit of pressure
How you're reading the game: when you're pushing forward, when you're holding position, whether your shot choice matches what's actually happening in front of you
What happens when things go wrong: how you move when you're tired, and more tellingly, how you respond after dropping a point you shouldn't have
A Playtomic level tells you where you sit. I'm more interested in telling you why you're sitting there, and, more to the point, what's the quickest route to sitting somewhere better.
Use both. Just don't mix them up.
I'm not telling you to ignore your rating. It's handy for finding a fair game and it's a decent enough scoreboard for whether you're generally trending upward. Keep it.
Just don't ask it to do a job it was never built for. The number tells you the score. I'll tell you the story behind it, and what to change so next time, the score looks a bit different.
If you've been stuck on the same number for months and can't work out why, that's usually your cue. More matches won't fix it. A proper look at what's actually happening on court probably will.