How OPI works
OPI is the Open Play Performance Index. It asks one question of every game you finish: of all the points played, how many were yours? Averaged over your games, that share is your OPI — which is why a close loss still counts for something and a narrow win doesn't count for much.
One game, one share
You won this one 11–7. That is 18 points played, and 11 of them were yours.
11 ÷ (11 + 7) × 100
61.1
In doubles both partners are credited the same share. OPI measures how the pair on your side of the net performed, not who hit which winner.
Every game, averaged
Your OPI is the plain average of those shares — every eligible game weighted the same, whatever the margin and whoever you played. Four games for this player:
| Game | Score | Points played | Your share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 11–7won | 18 | 61.1 |
| 2 | 11–9won | 20 | 55.0 |
| 3 | 15–7won | 22 | 68.2 |
| 4 | 9–11lost | 20 | 45.0 |
| OPI — the average of those 4 shares | 57.3 | ||
Game 4 was a loss and still contributed 45.0, because 9 of the 20 points played were still yours. Nothing here rewards winning as such — only the share of the scoreboard you took.
Which games count
A game reaches your average only once it is finished with a valid final score.
- Counts
- Any finished open-play or fixed-pairs game.
- Does not count
- A game still in progress, and every tournament game — a tournament spends your OPI on seeding, it never earns it. Reopen a finished game to fix a score and its old figures are discarded, not layered on top; finishing it again recomputes the average from scratch.
How settled the number is
An average over three games and one over thirty are not equally trustworthy, so your card carries a confidence tier alongside the figure. The tier describes how much history is behind the number. It never alters the number, and it never changes where you rank.
- Established
- 10 or more gamesEnough history that one unusual game barely moves it.
- Developing
- 3 to 9 gamesA real signal, still sensitive to a single lopsided game.
- Provisional
- 0 to 2 gamesToo little history to read as a standing yet.
The player above has 4 eligible games, so their 57.3 shows as developing.
How the board is ordered
The leaderboard sorts on OPI alone, highest first. Everything else you can see on a row is there to be read, not to break ties.
Who gets a rank
Anyone with at least one eligible game who has met the session's minimum. Everyone attending still appears on the board from the moment the session opens — players below the minimum are listed as present and unranked rather than hidden, ordered by how close they are to qualifying, with nobody's first game happening off-screen.
Exact ties
Two identical OPIs are ordered by name, purely so the rows render in a stable order. Ties are never broken by games played: turning up for more games must never cost you a place, and must never buy you one.
What point difference is for
Your points for and against, and the difference between them, are shown because they are worth knowing. None of them feed OPI or the ordering.
Session and all-time
The same formula runs over two scopes: the games in one session, and every eligible game you have played. A session board can therefore read quite differently from your all-time figure.
What OPI is not
OPI is a Devlab-original metric for open play. It is not an official USA Pickleball rating, and it is not DUPR, UTR-P or an Elo system — it does not model your opponents' strength, so beating a strong pair and beating a weak one by the same score are worth the same. The scoring engine follows standard side-out scoring concepts, but the software is not USA-Pickleball-certified.
Read it as what it measures: how much of the scoreboard you have been taking lately.