Solo Ranked Recon
Division 2
The volume division. Tomek5_5's 28,793 lifetime duels are the largest sample in the league; four players clear 5,000. It's also the division most marked by inactivity — three of twelve are delisted from the live ladder, and they cluster together for partly that reason.
Div 2 wins east of the Urals: Russia is a listed strength for six players (and a weakness for only two) — the strongest single-country consensus in the league. The US runs close behind (five strong, one weak). Brazil is where the division collectively bleeds (five weaknesses).
Three of twelve delisted (GramenMystace, sylvi_a, hazelnut) — treat that cluster's membership loosely. Kris: 0 NMPZ games. All other samples are robust.
State of the field
A snapshot before the detail: where the twelve sit on rating, experience and volume. The headline is the gap between seeded and current form — this is a field well off its collective best.
Seeded ratings average 2017; current form averages 1682 — the division sits 335 points below its enrollment ratings. 3 players carry no live rating, so a seeded value stands in; the current curve is, if anything, flattered. The axis is scaled to this division's own range.
Tick marks are individual players. Mean ~4.1 years, but read it loosely: account age is only a proxy for GeoGuessr experience, and it breaks for fresh accounts of veteran players. Median lifetime volume is 3,993 ranked duels.
Geographic signal map
Every player against every country that appears in a top-3 or bottom-3 list. Warm = a ranked strength, cool = a ranked weakness, intensity = list position. Columns are ordered by how much the field cares about that country. Hover any cell for the value.
Ordinal signal only: a blank cell means the country isn't in that player's top or bottom three — not that they're necessarily neutral there.
Contested ground
Countries that are a strength for some players and a weakness for others — the regions where a matchup is won or lost rather than shared.
Field patterns
Where the field collectively excels and bleeds. Shared weaknesses are the soft ground worth drilling — common blind spots across skill tiers.
Common strengths
- US — Tjay, GramenMystace, sylvi_a, Retolas, Kriszh
- RU — wang, Tomek5_5, sylvi_a, barle, hazelnut, Superhorstuwe
- CA — wang, Retolas, Kriszh, Kris
- AU — Tomek5_5, Retolas, Knowledge, Superhorstuwe
- MX — GramenMystace, sylvi_a, Kris
Common weaknesses
- BR — Tjay, Tomek5_5, barle, Knowledge, Superhorstuwe
- SE — Retolas, Kriszh, Kris
- IN — Retolas, hazelnut, Knowledge
- MX — Tomek5_5, barle, Superhorstuwe
- RU — Tjay, Kris
Shared soft spots (2+)
- BR — Tjay, Tomek5_5, barle, Knowledge, Superhorstuwe
- SE — Retolas, Kriszh, Kris
- IN — Retolas, hazelnut, Knowledge
- MX — Tomek5_5, barle, Superhorstuwe
- RU — Tjay, Kris
- ES — wang, barle
- JP — wang, Kris
- TH — GramenMystace, Superhorstuwe
- DE — wang, hazelnut
Player clusters — win-rate model
Our primary segmentation, built on lifetime per-mode win-rates over hundreds-to-thousands of ranked duels per player — measured outcomes, not imputed ratings, so no synthetic data props it up. Features: current ELO, lifetime overall and per-mode win-rate, a win-rate-derived mode lean, accuracy and volume. Ward and k-means agree. Two players resolve as singletons for real reasons (below). A second, rating-based model in section 06 triangulates this one. At n=12 these are reading aids, not hard tiers — silhouette ≈ 0.31, a real but soft structure.
5,400–28,800 duels each, all parked at 50.8–51.8%. Fully regressed, fully mode-flat, no obvious hole and no obvious edge. barle's 1,232 km average distance is the soft spot the accuracy data offers.
All three are delisted from the live ladder, and honesty requires saying their grouping partly reflects that shared data condition rather than a shared playstyle. hazelnut is the one to watch on the numbers that do exist: 64.4% lifetime, 60.9% NM, on 463 duels.
Every member's moving rate (58.7–75.0%) clears their restricted-mode rates, some by twenty points. Tjay earns his top seed here: 66.7% overall, 75.0% moving, over 4,000 duels. The group's restricted-mode numbers are the place to fight them — Retolas's 35.4% NMPZ and Kris's total absence of NMPZ history (see below) especially.
How to read the two cluster views
The clustering runs in a 6-dimensional feature space; these two plots are different windows onto it. The PCA map flattens that space to its two most informative axes; the dendrogram shows the order in which players merged into groups. Same data, complementary views.
PCA map. Each player projected onto the two directions of greatest spread in this division's data. A principal component has no fixed meaning — it is whatever mix of the six features varies most here — so the axis readings below are derived from this division's own loadings, not carried over from any other division. PC1, the horizontal axis (50% of the variance): moving right means a wider average guess distance, more even win-rates across modes and a restricted-mode lean. PC2, the vertical axis (33%): moving up means a higher current rating, less ranked volume and more even win-rates across modes. Two of the six features deserve definition, since both are computed from win-rates rather than from how often a mode is played: mode lean = mean(NM%, NMPZ%) − Moving%, i.e. which way a player's results tilt; mode spread = the standard deviation across their three mode win-rates, i.e. how lopsided they are regardless of direction. A player who wins 74/75/71 across the modes and one who wins 49/52/47 both score flat on these; a 65/54/33 profile scores strongly on both. Distance on the plot ≈ overall dissimilarity. Together the two axes hold 82% of the variance in the six clustering features.
Dendrogram. Built bottom-up: each player starts alone, then the two most similar join, repeatedly, until all are one. Bar height = how different two groups were when they merged — low joins (Retolas+Superhorstuwe) are near-twins; high joins happen late and grudgingly. Reading down from the top, the first split separates the strong tier from everyone else; cut the tree at any height to get that many clusters. Dot colour marks final cluster membership.
Two models, triangulated
We trust two models, built on independent signals. The win-rate model (section 04) asks who beats their opponents, from measured lifetime outcomes. The ELO model asks where the ladder places them now, from current per-mode ratings with mode-lean computed only from real (non-imputed) data — the honest rating view, silhouette 0.29. Where they agree, a finding is robust; where they diverge, that disagreement is itself signal worth a second look.
| Player | Win-rate model | ELO model |
|---|---|---|
| Kriszh | The grind quartet | Mid rated |
| Tomek5_5 | The grind quartet | Lower rated |
| barle | The grind quartet | Isolated |
| wang | The grind quartet | Mid rated |
| GramenMystace | The inactive wing | Higher rated |
| hazelnut | The inactive wing | Higher rated |
| sylvi_a | The inactive wing | Higher rated |
| Knowledge | Moving-first winners | Higher rated |
| Kris | Moving-first winners | Lower rated |
| Retolas | Moving-first winners | Lower rated |
| Superhorstuwe | Moving-first winners | Mid rated |
| Tjay | Moving-first winners | Higher rated |
What the divergences mean. The win-rate model produces this division's cleanest structure (its 0.39 silhouette is the best primary-model separation in the league bar Div 8's data-driven split). The ELO model fragments 2 into four groups, isolating barle alone — fragmentation that says more about scattered current ratings than about play. One genuine format note the models can't see but the register can: Kris has zero recorded NMPZ duels. In a nominate-and-ban format, that is either a fatal hole or a total unknown, and both are worth knowing.
Geographic similarity
Where each player's competence is concentrated — thread weight is the overlap in best-country lists. GeoGuessr ranks these countries within each player, so the lists say where someone is strong relative to their own baseline, not how strong they are.
Reading it
Thick threads mean two players' strengths sit in the same places — on a map drawn from those countries, neither gets an edge from familiarity. Thin or absent threads mean their competence is concentrated elsewhere, so map choice cuts between them. Because each player's top-3 is ranked against their own record, this maps the shape of a player's geographic knowledge with their overall level divided out: a Division 8 player and a Division 1 player can share a thread while being nowhere near each other in strength. It is a map of where someone is strong, not how strong they are — which is why it is kept separate from the clustering, and why a thread is a matchup cue rather than a prediction.