How ranked Hearts games work

By Marya · Updated by Holger in September 2026

Ranked Hearts games track how often you win and how well you play. This page explains the two ratings I keep and the rules that keep ranked games fair.

Elo ratings and skill

World of Card Games has ranked tables for Hearts.

A ranked game is like a regular game, except that your "Elo rating" and "skill rating" are recorded when the game ends. The rules are also stricter. If you can play ranked games, choose "Play ranked" in the Hearts menu on the home page, or "Join ranked table" in the menu on the Hearts game page. In the list of open tables, ranked tables have their own mark.

The "Elo rating" is described on Wikipedia. Many online games use it to rank players. I use it because almost everyone else does. I think some people will enjoy seeing how well they do in the ranks.

It takes skill to play a game of Hearts well, so I've added a "skill rating" to ranked games too.

Winning a game of Hearts takes several skills. As you grow in Hearts wisdom, you'll find that if you're dealt the Queen of Spades, you won't always want to pass it. Often you'll want to hold onto it and look for a chance to drop it on the player with the lowest score. It takes a lot of skill to know when to pass the Queen or hold it. It also takes skill to know when to play it, rather than dumping it on anyone at the first chance.

So the site records when you hold the Queen and when you drop it expertly on the player with the lowest score. Your skill rating is the number of times you drop the Queen on the "low man" divided by the number of times you hold the Queen. There are a few exceptions. In the first hand, for example, there's no low man (you all start at zero), so holding or dropping the Queen isn't recorded. Hands where two or more players share the lowest score don't count either. Nor do hands where someone shoots the moon or the sun. If you're the low man yourself, there's no one to drop the Queen on. Holding it still counts as a hold, so it lowers your skill rating a little.

Rules

These are the rules about who can play a ranked game:

• Only registered players can take part.
• You must be "experienced" at the site to take part. That just means finishing 10 games first. It gives you a chance to get to know the site before you play a more serious ranked game.
• You must keep Hearts turned on under "Leaderboards" in your settings. It's on by default for every eligible player.
• Bots can join a ranked table any time after the game has started, but not before.

There are also rules about how you play a ranked game:

• If you quit a ranked table before the game has finished, you'll be banned from ranked games for 1 hour.
• If you turn Hearts off under "Leaderboards", you'll be banned from ranked Hearts games for 1 week. Your Elo rating also goes back to the default of 1500, so think carefully before you do this.

If a player quits a ranked table, other players can join as "substitutes". Substitutes aren't ranked, so for them it plays like an ordinary game. Since ranked tables punish dropping out, players should be less likely to quit midway. That makes a ranked table a good one to join as a substitute. Sometimes a player drops out by accident, perhaps because of a computer problem. If you drop out but come back to the site within 3 minutes, you'll be reconnected to your ranked game automatically.

To see your Elo rating and skill rating, open the menu on your avatar in the top right corner, choose "Statistics", and pick Hearts. This is how it looked in 2015:

When you hover over a player in the list of open tables, you'll see their Elo rating:

How Elo ratings are computed

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining how Elo ratings are computed. It gives an example of someone playing in a 5-round tournament:

Suppose Player A has a rating of 1613, and plays in a five-round tournament. He or she loses to a player rated 1609, draws with a player rated 1477, defeats a player rated 1388, defeats a player rated 1586, and loses to a player rated 1720. The player's actual score is (0 + 0.5 + 1 + 1 + 0) = 2.5. The expected score, calculated according to the formula above, was (0.506 + 0.686 + 0.785 + 0.539 + 0.351) = 2.867. Therefore the player's new rating is (1613 + 32 * (2.5 − 2.867)) = 1601, assuming that a K-factor of 32 is used.

That example is from chess, where every game has 2 players. A game of Hearts has 4 players and usually just one winner. So for Hearts, World of Card Games uses a version of Elo made for a whole table. Here's an example (the gory details are here only for those who are intensely interested).

Suppose players A, B, C, and D have ratings of 1512, 1562, 1484, and 1417. First, each player's rating R is turned into a strength of 10^(R/400). A player's chance of winning is their strength divided by the total strength at the table. Here that gives A a 27% chance of winning, B 35%, C 23%, and D 15%.

At World of Card Games, the K factor is 25 for every player. Suppose player A wins. Each of the other players loses K times their own chance of winning. Player B loses 25 * 0.354 = 8.9 points, so their new rating is 1553. Player C loses 5.7 points and drops to 1478. Player D loses 3.8 points and drops to 1413.

Player A gains all the points the others lost, 18.4 in total, for a new rating of 1530. If two or more players tie for the lowest score, they share those points.

So the players who come in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th have all lost to the winner. Their places among themselves don't change their ratings.

Check out the Wikipedia article for more details if you're curious. Of course, there are flaws in applying a rating system built for chess to a card game like Hearts. Most game sites use this system, so I've followed suit.

Why don't second and third place count?

To some people, it feels natural that a player who comes 2nd did better than the players in 3rd and 4th. Some have told me they want 2nd place to count, since it shows they're at least doing better than coming last. Others have told me it shouldn't count. They say only 1st place matters in Hearts. In their view, giving 2nd place credit for a "win" over 3rd and 4th gives players a reason to play poorly, by aiming for 2nd instead of going all out for 1st. (If you often come in 2nd, you'll probably want to change your strategy.)

There's one advantage to giving people credit for finishing ahead of last place. If 2nd and 3rd place get no credit at all, those players have less reason to finish the game.

The Elo ratings are set up so that only 1st place is rewarded, due to popular demand. As the previous section shows, the players who come in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th all lose rating to the winner. Even so, everyone still has a good reason not to quit when they're losing. A player who quits early is rated as a loss. On top of that, 1% of their rating comes off. So quitting always costs more than staying to the end.