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Elo Rating Explained
From chess to football - how a 60-year-old algorithm still anchors modern models
The Elo formula
Football-specific adjustments
Why Elo works so well as a baseline
Elo vs market odds
Frequently asked
Where does the number 400 in the Elo formula come from?
It's a scaling constant chosen so that a 400-point rating gap corresponds to a 91% expected win rate. It's arbitrary - if you used a different constant, you'd just rescale all the ratings. Most chess and football implementations use 400 for historical consistency.
How often does BetsPlug update Elo ratings?
After every match. The rating update runs as part of our post-match pipeline and flows into the next round of predictions within minutes of the final whistle.
Can Elo predict draws?
Not directly. Vanilla Elo only outputs an expected score for one team (between 0 and 1). To get explicit draw probability you either map the expected score through a trained draw-rate curve or feed the Elo gap into a Poisson model. BetsPlug does the latter inside its ensemble.
What's the highest Elo rating any football club has ever had?
Club-level Elo (via ClubElo.com) has peaked around 2100–2150 for teams like prime Barcelona (2011), Bayern Munich (2013), and Manchester City (2018). Anything above 2000 is elite.
Does Elo work for international tournaments?
Yes, but with caveats. National teams play fewer matches, so their ratings take longer to converge and are more vulnerable to small-sample noise. The World Football Elo Ratings project maintains national-team Elo scores using adjusted K factors.