Four people, one court, ninety minutes. If the four are well matched, everyone leaves happy. If one pair sits two levels above the other, the match is effectively over in twenty minutes and nobody enjoyed it – including the winners.

Stopping that from happening, before anyone books, is the entire job of a padel rating.

If you have just picked up a racket, you have probably been asked “what’s your level?” and given a vague answer. If you have been playing a while, you have probably had an argument about it. This post explains what those numbers actually are, how the best-known system calculates them, what it costs and who pays for it, and what your realistic options are in Bulgaria.

Rating, ranking, level – three different things

These three words get used interchangeably, and that is the source of most of the confusion.

• A level is a description. “Intermediate.” “2.5.” It is a label someone assigned – usually you, usually from a chart or a questionnaire. It does not move on its own.
• A rating is an estimate. It is a number a system updates after every result, and its job is to predict how your next match will go. If it is working, two teams with the same combined rating should produce a close match.
• A ranking is a table. It sorts people by points collected over a period – a season, a tour, a club year. It rewards showing up and winning, and it usually resets.

A rating answers “how strong are you right now?” A ranking answers “who has done best lately?” Those are different questions, and the same player can sit high in one and low in the other.

Bulgaria has examples of all three, and we will get to each of them.

The idea underneath every rating system

Almost every modern padel rating is a descendant of Elo, the system built for chess. The logic is short:

1. Before the match, the system predicts the result from the ratings involved.
2. After the match, it compares that prediction to what actually happened.
3. It moves everyone’s rating in proportion to how surprised it was.

Beat a team you were expected to beat and you gain very little – the system already knew. Beat a team well above you and you gain a lot, because the system was wrong and has to correct itself. Lose to a team well below you and you drop hard, for exactly the same reason.

Modern systems add a second number: confidence – Playtomic calls it reliability, Courtly calls it reliability too. It tracks how sure the system is about you. A new player has low confidence and their rating swings wildly while the system triangulates. A player with two hundred recorded matches has high confidence and barely moves at all.

That second number is the part most players never notice, and it explains most of the complaints about ratings being “unfair”.

Padel also adds a complication chess does not have: it is a doubles sport. You never play alone, so every result is evidence about two people at once and the system has to split the credit somehow. That is a genuine structural limitation rather than a bug waiting to be fixed – more on it below.

How the Playtomic level works

Playtomic was founded in Madrid in 2017 and is now the largest booking platform in racket sports, with several thousand clubs and well over a million players across dozens of countries. In some markets it handles the large majority of app-based padel bookings. Its level is, in practice, the closest thing padel has to a common currency.

The scale

0 to 7, expressed in hundredths. 0 is someone who has never held a racket; 7 is professional. Most recreational players live somewhere between 2.0 and 4.5. The scale is not linear – the step from 5.0 to 6.0 represents a far bigger gap in real playing terms than the step from 1.0 to 2.0.

Where your first number comes from

A questionnaire when you sign up: how long you have played, whether you have taken lessons, what you can do with the ball. You answer it once – the initial assessment cannot be retaken – and it sets your starting level. Everything after that comes from match results.

What moves it

After every competitive match, Playtomic looks at four things:

• whether you won or lost
• the levels of your opponents
• the level of your partner
• your reliability

It averages each team’s level, compares the expected outcome with the actual one, and adjusts all four players individually. Two partners in the same match usually move by different amounts, because they arrived with different levels and different reliability.

Reliability, and why a loss can cost more than a win pays

Reliability is a percentage that grows as you record matches. Playtomic describes it as the single most important factor in how far your level moves. Low reliability means big swings; high reliability means small ones. It cannot be set manually by you or by support – only playing builds it. One exception: completing a leveling session at a certified club sets it to 50%, because a coach’s assessment is treated as trustworthy evidence.

This is where the most common complaint originates. Players notice they drop 0.4 for a defeat but gain only 0.25 for a win and conclude the system is stacked against them. It is not. If your rating says you should beat this team, beating them merely confirms what the system already believed, so it pays little. Losing to them contradicts it, and the system has to correct. The asymmetry is the system telling you your current number is roughly right.

Competitive versus casual

Only competitive matches move your level. Flag a match as casual and you can play with no consequences at all, even if you record the score.

A result also has to be a real result. The score needs a clear winner, one side must reach 6 or 7 games, and there must be a two-game margin unless someone reached 7 – so 6-4 counts and 6-5 does not. Results rejected by another player, or scores that do not parse, simply do not count.

Ties are handled deliberately: the team with the higher combined level loses points and the lower-rated team gains them, on the reasoning that a draw against a weaker pair is itself information.

Fixing a level that is wrong

There are three routes, and they are asymmetric on purpose:

• Down, by yourself. You can lower your padel level directly in the app. It is one-way – once lowered, you cannot simply put it back.
• Up, by peer review. If enough opponents rate you above your level, the app may unlock a self-upgrade worth up to 0.5. The offer disappears if you play another match without acting on it, and it does not come back.
• Up or down, by assessment. A leveling session with a certified coach at a partner club, bookable through the app.

The 10-Match Challenge

A newer feature for players whose reliability has reached 85% or higher and who believe their number is stuck in the wrong place. You opt in, pick a multiplier of 2x, 3x or 4x, and your next ten competitive matches move your level by that multiple – a change that would normally be +0.04 becomes +0.12 at 3x.

The rules are strict: you cannot change the multiplier or quit once the first match is played, only private bookings and open matches at Playtomic clubs with validated scores count, and there is a three-month wait before you can do it again. It cuts both ways – ten bad matches at 4x will take you down just as quickly as ten good ones take you up.

The rankings are a separate thing entirely

Confusingly, Playtomic also has rankings, and they work nothing like the level:

• Club ranking – points from matches played at one venue
• Global ranking – cumulative points across everything, never reset
• Level ranking – your position among all players, sorted by level

The first two are activity tables. You collect points for playing, for winning, for sets won, for joining as somebody’s guest, with a bonus for beating higher-ranked teams. Playtomic is explicit that this is a ranking of the most active players, not the best ones: a modest player who plays four times a week will finish above a strong player who plays twice a month. That is the design, not a flaw.

Why the level is free

One thing worth knowing before you read your own number. The level costs nothing because the level is not the product – court occupancy is. A good rating produces good open matches, good open matches fill the awkward Tuesday 14:00 slot that would otherwise sit empty, and full courts keep clubs paying their subscription. Playtomic makes its money from transaction fees, an optional player subscription and what it charges clubs, but nobody is charged for the number itself.

That is not a criticism. It is simply the right frame for reading the number: a matchmaking tool that happens to look like a score. Which is also the reason nobody should treat it as a national merit table.

What ratings solve, and what they do not

WHAT THEY GENUINELY FIX

• The awkward conversation. “Level range 2.5 to 3.0” is a sentence four strangers can agree on before anyone puts money down.
• Playing with strangers at all. Open matches only work if the platform can make a decent guess about who fits.
• Seeding. Draws, groups and balanced Americano rounds all need an ordering to start from.
• Visible progress. Most players improve invisibly over months. A curve helps you see it.
• Portability. The same number at a different club, a different city, or on holiday somewhere with courts.

WHAT THEY CANNOT FIX

• The partner problem. Padel is doubles. Your result is entangled with your partner’s, and no algorithm fully separates a decent player carried by a great partner from a great player dragging a weak one. Always playing with the same people distorts your number in ways the system cannot see.
• Sandbagging. Under-rating yourself to win easy matches works, and every platform has people doing it. Peer review and leveling sessions exist largely because of it.
• Small pools. A rating is a comparison. If everyone you play is from your own club, your number describes your club, not the country. Two players on 3.2 in different cities may not be close at all.
• Cross-platform translation. A Playtomic 3.2, a Courtly 3.2 and a federation category are different scales built by different people for different populations. Conversion charts exist online; none of them are reliable.
• Telling you how good you are. A rating tells you who you should be playing against. That is a narrower claim, and a far more useful one.

The Bulgarian picture

Courtly

Courtly is a Bulgarian padel app built by Cleverix, launched at the end of 2025, with a full rating system added in July 2026. It works with a partner network covering Sofia, Varna, Burgas, Plovdiv, Pleven, Stara Zagora, Blagoevgrad, Pernik, Ruse and beyond, and – unusually – it publishes its rating rules in full, which makes it easy to describe accurately.

The scale. 0 to 7, separate for each sport, deliberately non-linear. Courtly’s own bands are 0-1 Novice, 2-3 Beginner, 4-5 Intermediate, 6-7 Advanced. They state plainly that climbing from 6 to 7 costs far more than climbing from 1 to 2, and that you can fall below 1.

Starting level. A self-assessment survey of under two minutes, covering five areas: experience, technique, tactics, competitive play, and peer rating. You can skip it and still play friendlies, but you need a level before you can play competitive.

Friendly versus competitive. Same principle as Playtomic. Friendlies never touch your rating. Competitive matches move it once the result is confirmed.

Match format. Best of three sets. Six games with a two-game lead, 7-5 at 5-5, a tiebreak at 6-6, tiebreak first to seven by two, and a golden point – the star point – on the third deuce. If time runs out mid-set you finish it as a tiebreak, with the games already played carried over as points.

What moves it. More when you beat a stronger team, when you win by a bigger margin, and when your rating is still new. Less when you scrape past a weaker team or your rating is already well established. Reliability tightens the more you play and loosens after a break, so your first match back moves you more than usual.

Confirming results. One team enters the score, the other approves or counters it, and silence auto-approves after 24 hours. If a score is disputed twice, the match converts to friendly and stops counting – a tidy way to end an argument rather than let it run.

One rule worth reading twice. The line-up as it stands when the match starts is the pairing that gets rated. Swapping partners later does not change who the result counts for, so get the teams right before you begin.

Level ranges. Every open competitive game carries a level range. Players inside it join directly; anyone outside needs approval from everyone already signed up.

Cost. Friendly games and seeing your current level are free forever. Competitive – that is, ranked – play sits behind Courtly Premium, along with the leaderboard, rating history, head-to-head records and performance stats. What that costs, and how it compares, is at the end of this post.

Two things follow from ranked play being a paid feature. First, the rated population self-selects: everyone in it chose to pay in order to compete, which arguably makes it a more serious pool. Second, it is a smaller pool by construction, so the caveat about small pools applies with real force.

Sportner

Sportner (sportner.online) sits at the simple, low-cost end of the same space: find players, join games, discover venues, across several sports rather than padel alone. Less machinery, less commitment, and correspondingly less rating apparatus than either Playtomic or Courtly. For a group that mainly needs to organise games and keep a rough sense of who plays at what standard, that can be exactly enough – and there is a real argument that most casual groups never need more than this.

Club rankings built on activity and points

Several clubs run their own leaderboards. These are almost always points-and-activity systems rather than ratings: you collect points for turning up, for matches played, for wins, sometimes weighted by who you beat. They reset seasonally, they reward the regulars, and they are excellent at what they are actually for – keeping a community coming back and giving the Tuesday-night crowd something to argue about.

Just do not read them as a strength table. As Playtomic says about its own club ranking, the top places go to the most active players rather than the best ones. A club leaderboard tells you who is there a lot. That is genuinely useful information. It simply is not a rating.

BG Padel Tour

The BG Padel Tour ranking is the one official national list. It runs alongside the Bulgarian Padel Federation and the Bulgarian Tennis Federation, it is split by gender, and it is built from results at official tournaments only. Your club matches, your open matches and your app rating have no effect on it whatsoever. It is a tour ranking in the same sense as the FIP list: points earned at sanctioned events, and nothing else.

It also does not use a decimal at all. Instead there are four named levels – Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum – and events are frequently restricted to particular ones, which is what stops a Platinum pair from walking through a beginners’ draw. Those labels are local and relative: they describe a position inside the Bulgarian system as it stands today, not a point on an international scale.

Which is the same warning as the one about converting between apps, arriving from a different direction. A number or a badge only means something relative to the population that produced it.

We have covered how it works in detail in Padel Rankings in Bulgaria: How the BG Padel Tour System Works.

Side by side

Four different things that all get called “my ranking” in conversation:

	Playtomic level	Courtly rating	Club points ranking	BG Padel Tour
What it is	Dynamic skill rating, Elo-style	Dynamic skill rating, Elo-style	Activity leaderboard	Official tournament ranking
Scale	0 to 7, in hundredths	0 to 7, non-linear, separate per sport	Points, defined by the club	Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, plus points
First number comes from	One-time questionnaire, cannot be retaken	Self-assessment survey across five areas	Zero at the start of the season	Unranked until you enter an official event
What moves it	Result, opponent levels, partner level, reliability	Result, margin, opponent strength, reliability	Turning up, playing, winning	Tournament results only
Cost to play rated	Free; percentage fee per transaction, highest on open matches; removed by optional Premium	Courtly Premium subscription required	Usually free, or club membership	Tournament entry fees
Does it reset	No	No, but reliability loosens after a break	Usually seasonal	Rolling season
Reach	Global, around 35 countries; thin footprint in Bulgaria	Bulgaria, across partner clubs	One club	National, official events
Best used for	A fair match at a big club or abroad	A fair match in Bulgaria	Community, regulars, club life	Players chasing a national standing

What it costs

Neither platform charges you for the number itself. They differ in how they charge for everything around it.

Playtomic’s level is free and so is ranked play. What you pay is a transaction fee, and in most countries it is a percentage rather than a flat sum, set higher for open matches than for a plain court booking – which matters, because open matches are how you get a rated game with strangers. The rate varies widely: 4% on a booking and 8.5% on an open match in the Netherlands, a fifth of the match cost with a floor and a cap in the UK, a flat 0.29 euros in Spain, and nothing published for Bulgaria, which is absent from the table entirely. Club wallet top-ups carry no fee anywhere. An optional subscription, Playtomic Premium, removes the fees and unlocks advanced statistics and full level history; the price is set per market in the app stores.

Courtly inverts it. Ranked play is the paid feature, at around 3.99 euros a month at the time of writing, with the current price shown in the App Store and Google Play. Clubs pay Playtomic separately through Manager subscriptions and a booking commission, neither of which is published.

Which works out cheaper is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it turns entirely on how much you play.

A transaction fee scales with use; a subscription does not. At four rated matches a month, Playtomic’s fees run somewhere between about one and six euros depending on the country, so a subscription of any kind is poor value – you would be buying the statistics, not a saving. At eight matches, which is twice a week and not a lot, the fees roughly double while a subscription stays where it is. Around that point the flat models win: a Courtly subscription costs less than a month of Dutch-rate Playtomic fees, and Playtomic Premium starts to pay for itself as well.

So the same subscription is good value for the player who plays often and poor value for the player who does not, and that is true of both apps equally. Two caveats worth stating plainly: these figures come from different countries, so this describes the shape of two pricing models rather than a choice any one player faces – and in Bulgaria, where Playtomic is thin on the ground and has no published fee, it is largely not a choice at all.

How to read your own number

• Answer the survey honestly. Everything is built on it. Inflate it and you get matches you lose; deflate it and you get matches nobody enjoys, including you.
• Watch reliability before you watch the number. In your first ten or twenty rated matches, the rating is a guess with a wide error bar around it. Judge it after that, not before.
• Play rated matches with rated intent. If you are experimenting with a new bandeja and genuinely do not care about the result, mark the match casual or friendly. That is what the setting is there for.
• Do not convert between platforms. Your Courtly number and your Playtomic number are not the same number, and no conversion table will make them one.
• A bigger swing after a break is normal. Both systems loosen confidence after time off, so your first matches back move you further. That is not a punishment, it is the system re-checking.
• Remember what it is for. The number exists to get you good games. Chasing it turns padel into admin.

The short version

A rating is a prediction, not a verdict. Playtomic’s is the global standard and it is free to hold, because the real product is court occupancy rather than the number itself. Courtly’s is the strongest Bulgarian equivalent, documented in unusual detail, with ranked play behind a subscription. Club leaderboards measure attendance. The BG Padel Tour ranking measures tournament results, and nothing else.

Pick the one that matches what you actually want. If you want fair, enjoyable games on a Tuesday evening, an app rating is the answer. If you want a national standing, you have to enter tournaments – no amount of app matches will get you there. They are almost two different sports, and knowing which one you are playing is most of the value.

RELATED ON PADELMAP.BG

• Padel Rankings in Bulgaria: How the BG Padel Tour System Works
• Americano and Mexicano: How Padel’s Two Most Popular Formats Work
• Padel Leagues in Bulgaria: Weekly Matches, Standings, and Finals

INDEPENDENCE

_{PadelMap.bg is an independent, volunteer-run project. We have no commercial relationship with Playtomic, Courtly, Sportner, BG Padel Tour or any club mentioned here. Nobody pays us for placement, ranking or a mention – not on this page and not anywhere else on the site.}

_{Prices, features and platform rules change often. Everything here reflects publicly available information at the time of writing (08.2026). If something is out of date or wrong, write to contact@padelmap.bg and we will fix it.}