Solo Ranked Recon
Division 8
The frontier. Six of ten carry no live rating; three have lifetime samples under a hundred duels; one — Ibicf — has three. The clustering below is honest about what it can see, and what it mostly sees is data availability. This is the one division where the tables should be read in pencil, and where a few weeks of round results will outweigh everything on this page.
Mexico splits the division evenly (three strong, three weak). The US and Brazil are where Div 8 collectively bleeds — five listed weaknesses each. Structurally: Div 8's enrollment spread (708–1140) is the widest relative band in the league, so the seeding itself is doing more work here than anywhere else.
Six of ten without live ratings; NMPZ effectively unmeasured division-wide (best sample: 26 games); one player's geographic record is absent. Every judgement on this page is provisional to a degree that isn't true anywhere else in the league.
State of the field
A snapshot before the detail: where the ten 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 1020; current form averages 989 — the division sits 31 points below its enrollment ratings. 6 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 ~3.6 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 520 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
- MY — Meko, Ibicf
- MX — Mio666, LUKAS, Ibicf
- AR — GeoJoe, Cyanide
- AU — Meko, LUKAS
- GT — Peelep
Common weaknesses
- US — Mio666, Cyanide, LUKAS, Varso, Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff
- BR — Mio666, Peelep, GeoJoe, LUKAS, Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff
- MX — Peelep, Cyanide, Varso
- ID — Meko, LUKAS, Ibicf
- AR — Mio666
Shared soft spots (2+)
- US — Mio666, Cyanide, LUKAS, Varso, Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff
- BR — Mio666, Peelep, GeoJoe, LUKAS, Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff
- MX — Peelep, Cyanide, Varso
- ID — Meko, LUKAS, Ibicf
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=10 these are reading aids, not hard tiers — silhouette ≈ 0.31, a real but soft structure.
Nineteen, 278, three and 87 lifetime duels respectively. Varso's 60.4% on 278 is the only number here approaching meaning; the rest are anecdotes, including two technically perfect records (Ibicf 100% over 3, Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff's single NM win). New accounts, alt accounts, or genuinely new players — the data cannot distinguish.
77.9% and 71.2% moving, both with average distances beyond 1,400 km: they win on instinct and region-read, not on the pin. Restricted modes pull both back to 40–57%. Cyanide's −155 is the division's largest measured decline.
The only players with conventional samples (498–785 duels): 52–57%, modest mode splits, believable numbers. GeoJoe's 57.7% NM is the best restricted figure in the division. LUKAS's 21.4% NMPZ (14 games) and Peelep's single career NMPZ game set up the division-wide caveat below.
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 (51% of the variance): moving right means more ranked volume, a lower lifetime win-rate and more uneven win-rates across modes. PC2, the vertical axis (36%): moving up means a wider average guess distance, a lower current rating and a moving-mode lean. 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 87% 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 (Mio666+Peelep) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ibicf | Unmeasured | Lower rated |
| Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff | Unmeasured | Lower rated |
| Naathaan | Unmeasured | Lower rated |
| Varso | Unmeasured | Lower rated |
| Cyanide | The moving pair | Lower rated |
| Meko | The moving pair | Lower rated |
| GeoJoe | The measured four | Mid rated |
| LUKAS | The measured four | Isolated |
| Mio666 | The measured four | Mid rated |
| Peelep | The measured four | Mid rated |
What the divergences mean. In Div 8 the two models don't so much disagree as measure different amounts of nothing: the ELO model lumps six players together largely on imputed enrollment values. The lifetime model's apparently strong separation (0.43 silhouette, the league's best) is exactly the trap — it is cleanly separating players by how much data they have, which looks like structure and isn't skill. Weight the seeding and the round-by-round results over anything clustered here.
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.