About Leaderboard

Leaderboard is fantasy geopolitics. You enter a tournament, put a probability on real-world events — elections, negotiations, central-bank decisions, conflicts, economic data — and get scored on accuracy as those events resolve. Four weeks later the standings are final and you have a number that says how well you read the world.

Not a pick, a probability. Saying 70% and being wrong costs you far less than saying 95% and being wrong, and being right at 95% pays more than being right at 70%. The scoring makes hedging safe and conviction expensive, which is the whole point: it rewards the honesty of the number rather than the boldness of the take.

Everybody has opinions about the world and almost nobody keeps score. Pundits are never marked. Group chats forget. The confident voice wins the argument and then the argument evaporates, so nothing is ever learned by anyone, least of all the person who was wrong.

Prediction markets solved the scoring problem and made it a trading floor — spreads, liquidity, positions. Forecasting tournaments solved it for people who want a serious hobby. Neither is a game you play with your friends on a Tuesday. That is the gap: the arc, the standings, the reason to come back — the parts fantasy sports figured out — applied to the news rather than to football.

The scoring is real, the questions are real, and the record is permanent. What is deliberately missing is a market: there is nothing to trade, nothing to buy, and no position to take against another player.

1. Enter. Free. A tournament runs about four weeks and carries a fixed set of events, each with a precise question, a resolution date, and a source named in advance.
2. Set your slate. One probability per event. You can revise any of them right up until that event locks — locking happens per event, on its own clock, never all at once.
3. Make THE CALL. Exactly one event on your slate scores double. It is mandatory, and it locks when you first submit.
4. Get scored. Each event pays 100 × (1 − (p − o)²) — the Brier score, as points. The standings move as events resolve, and every resolution is logged with its source.
5. Keep the record. Your track record and the standings — Best predictor and Most winnings on each tournament, plus daily, monthly and yearly across every call — carry across tournaments. That, rather than any single result, is the thing you are actually building.

The full lifecycle — locking, disputes, voids, extensions — is on the rules page, and the common questions are on the FAQ.

• Not a betting site. Entry is free, there is no wagering, no stake, and no cash out. You cannot bet against another player and there is no house.
• Not a prediction market. Nothing is bought or sold, there is no price, and your probability is a forecast rather than a position. Your number cannot be moved by anyone else's money.
• Not financial or betting advice. Everything on the site is opinion, scored for accuracy. Crowd figures are the average of what players guessed, not a forecast anyone should act on.
• Not a place to be first. Being loud early is worth nothing here. Only the calibration of the number counts.

The failure mode of a game like this is an arguable outcome, so the defence is built into how questions are written rather than into who arbitrates them. Every event commits, before anyone can answer it, to a precise threshold and a named source, plus a backup. When it resolves, the source and the reading are published in the resolution log alongside the result.

When a question turns out to be genuinely ambiguous, or its premise collapses — the summit is cancelled, the election is postponed — the event is voided with a written reason and scored for nobody. A surprising or unpopular outcome is never grounds. The point of the log is that you never have to take our word for a result.

There is none. Every tournament is free to enter, there are no paid tiers, no in-app purchases, and no advertising on the site. Rewards after resolution are intended, and the scoring does not change when they arrive.

That is the product today, and today is doing real work in that sentence. Leaderboard is early, and paid formats are intended once it is a finished product rather than a first version. When that happens it will be a separate, clearly-labelled thing with its own terms, built for the rules of the place it operates in — announced in advance, and never applied to a tournament you have already entered. What will not change is the scoring: there will be no way to buy a better position on a board.

A small founding team in Australia, building this because we wanted to play it. The product is early: it launched in August 2026 and is being built in the open, which means some of it is unfinished and the pages that describe it say which parts.

Questions, a disputed resolution, an event you think is badly worded, or a bug — write to theworldleaderboard@gmail.com. It reaches the people who build it.

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Event artwork uses public-domain and Creative Commons photographs: official portraits, government imagery, and Wikimedia Commons sources, cropped from their originals.