Anna Leigh Waters won all 17 of her matches in our Worlds data from the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships in Farmers Branch, Texas. She took the women’s singles, the women’s doubles with Anna Bright and the mixed with Ben Johns, ten games on Championship Sunday alone. Her Heat Check score before the week was 135.2. Her score after the week is 135.2.
Not roughly the same. The same.
Meanwhile, at Ali Bey Club in Manavgat, Türkiye, Jada Bui won 21 of her 22 matches at the European Open and climbed from 194th to 45th on our global list. Mackonner Dy went from 335th to 98th. Maximilian Wild, who had a losing record in our data before the week, went from 734th to 137th.
If you read that and think our model has lost its marbles, I understand. I thought something similar when I first saw it. It hasn’t, quite. But it is worth explaining why the greatest week of the year barely registered at the top, and why a tournament in Türkiye shook up everything below it.
What changed this week?
First, the label on the tin. Heat Check is World Pickleball Magazine’s own rating model, not an official ranking, and nobody is seeded on it. Its base blends PKLStats Rating v2 with our own Results Elo, counted from match scores across the tours, and on top of that sit small, capped bonuses for recent form, MLP team form, Fantasy and Traders. The method page has the detail.
This week’s update added results through 8 November: 297 matches from the Worlds main draws, 322 from the 18+ Open divisions of the European Open, and the results of two PPA Tour Asia Challengers played in China in October. Nothing else moved. The PKLStats ratings still run to 31 August, and the Fantasy and Traders signals were not refreshed. So every change below comes from match results, and only match results.
Why didn’t Waters move?
Because she was already at the ceiling, twice over.
Our Results Elo is mapped onto the PKLStats scale and capped at 12 points above the median eligible rating. The median is 98.5, so the ceiling is 110.5. Waters was there before Worlds. So were Bright, Johns, Kate Fahey, Jorja Johnson and ten others, 15 players in all. Her own Elo did rise, from 1,917 to 1,940, and her women’s singles figure jumped from 1,671 to 1,723. None of that can show in a number that is already capped.
The form bonus is capped too, at five points, and it is worked out from the last 20 matches. Waters was 20-0 in her last 20 before Worlds. She is 20-0 in her last 20 after it. You cannot improve on perfect, which is a sentence I suspect the rest of the women’s tour has been muttering for some time.
So the top six of the global list are the same six, in the same order: Waters, Bright, Johns, Hayden Patriquin, Jorja Johnson, Fahey. Johns gained a point of form. Patriquin’s score dropped half a point. That’s it.
Is that a flaw? Partly. A cap exists so that a handful of players with huge win records don’t run off the scale, and it does that job. The cost is that the model cannot say how much better than everyone the very best are. For the 15 players at the ceiling, Heat Check is a podium, not a ruler.
Who did climb at Worlds?
Below the ceiling, Worlds did exactly what you would want.
JW Johnson went from ninth to seventh, from 119.5 to 121.8, past Gabriel Tardio and Tyra Hurricane Black. He won the men’s doubles with Tama Shimabukuro from two games down against Andrei Daescu and Christian Alshon, and reached the mixed final with Jorja Johnson. His men’s doubles Elo went from 1,685 to 1,746, the biggest discipline gain of anyone in our top ten. I have already written my column about him winning things. The model agrees with the column.
John Lucian Goins went from 20th to 14th, from 113.4 to 115.9, after beating Jack Sock 11-5, 12-10 for a second straight Worlds men’s singles title. His men’s singles Elo rose from 1,663 to 1,721. That one is a clean read: a singles specialist won the biggest singles event of the year, and his singles number went up by more than anything else in his file.
And then there is the awkward one. Shimabukuro, a world champion at 15, went from 119th to 108th. That is not a typo and it is not a judgement on Sunday. His WPM Results rating is 105.6, which is healthy. But his PKLStats Rating v2 is 93.5, built from 58 MLP doubles games and frozen at 31 August, and the base is the average of the two. So the model still half-remembers a teenager’s MLP summer, and doesn’t yet know about his autumn.
That is the biggest single argument for refreshing the PKLStats figures. Until we do, read his position as out of date rather than wrong.
Why did Manavgat move the list so much?
| Player | Week’s result | Heat Check before | After | Score before | Score after |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anna Leigh Waters | Worlds: three golds | 1 | 1 | 135.2 | 135.2 |
| JW Johnson | Worlds: men’s doubles gold, mixed silver | 9 | 7 | 119.5 | 121.8 |
| John Lucian Goins | Worlds: men’s singles gold | 20 | 14 | 113.4 | 115.9 |
| Tama Shimabukuro | Worlds: men’s doubles gold | 119 | 108 | 102.2 | 102.5 |
| Megan Fudge | European Open: women’s doubles gold, mixed bronze | 48 | 23 | 108.2 | 112.7 |
| Jake Bower | European Open: men’s singles gold, men’s doubles bronze | 78 | 28 | 104.7 | 111.1 |
| Aidan Schenk | European Open: men’s doubles bronze, mixed bronze | 80 | 38 | 104.6 | 109.2 |
| Jada Bui | European Open: women’s singles and doubles gold, mixed silver | 194 | 45 | 99.5 | 108.4 |
| Ben Cawston | European Open: men’s doubles silver | 59 | 51 | 106.2 | 107.3 |
| Mackonner Dy | European Open: men’s doubles gold | 335 | 98 | 95.8 | 103.0 |
| Maximilian Wild | European Open: men’s doubles gold, mixed silver, singles bronze | 734 | 137 | 88.1 | 100.9 |
Source: WPM Heat Check, global list, before and after the update adding results through 8 November 2026. WPM model ratings, not official rankings. Table: World Pickleball Magazine.
Two things happened in Türkiye, and only one of them is a story about the players.
The first is real. The European Open was a good week for a group of touring pros, and they won almost everything. Bui won the women’s singles from a game down against Pei Chuan Kao and the women’s doubles with Megan Fudge, and lost one match all week, the mixed final with Wild. Bower beat Bálint Bakó 11-2, 11-7 for the men’s singles. Wild and Dy beat Ben Cawston and Louis Laville 12-10, 11-9 for the men’s doubles. Those are titles, and the Elo moved accordingly: Fudge’s women’s doubles figure went from 1,697 to 1,755, Bower’s men’s singles from 1,665 to 1,715, Bui’s women’s singles from 1,613 to 1,674.
The second is about us. Our form bonus counts the last 20 matches, and it counts every one of them the same. A round-robin win in Manavgat is worth as much as a semi-final win in Farmers Branch. Bui had gone 10-10 in her previous last 20. After Manavgat she is 19-1, and her form bonus went from nothing to 4.5 points. That is more than half of her 8.8-point rise.
We do measure field strength; we just don’t use it there. On our own numbers, the average Results Elo of the entrants in the five Worlds divisions ran from 1,580 to 1,622. The European Open’s was 1,541. Our regional lists already weight results by that measure. The global form bonus does not, and on this week’s evidence it should.
So which part of the climb is real? Fudge’s, mostly. Her rise came from the base, not the bonus: her Results rating went from 106.2 to 110.2, within a whisker of the ceiling, and her form bonus moved only half a point. Bower and Schenk sit somewhere in between. Bui and Dy are the ones I’d want to see do it again against a Worlds-strength field before I believed every place of it. Wild’s leap of nearly 600 places tells you mostly how bunched the list is down there. Anyone near the bottom of a 929-player table who wins a lot in one week will look like a rocket.
And the British?
Cawston had a fine week and the model says so. He went 12-2 in Manavgat, reached the men’s doubles final with Laville and a mixed quarter-final with Caroline Nothnagel, and climbed from 59th to 51st globally. His headline Results Elo went from 1,647 to 1,673 and his mixed figure from 1,524 to 1,563. He stays top of our UK list, and on our Europe list he jumped from eighth to second, behind only Ignasi De Rueda, who keeps the top spot. Bálint Bakó, the men’s singles runner-up, rose from fifth to third.
Laville is the odd one out. His Results rating actually rose, from 107.4 to 109.0, and he reached a final. But his last 20 now include six defeats, his form bonus halved from four points to two, and he slipped from 28th to 30th globally and from third to fourth in Europe. On the UK list that was enough to drop him a place, to third, behind Eleanor Tomkinson, who has no new results in our data at all. Regular readers will remember Bolton, where the finalists climbed and the champions stood still. This time the losing finalist slipped and the player at home moved up. I’ll let you decide which is stranger.
Who paid for it?
Every climb comes out of somebody’s pocket. The clearest case is Andrea Bosi, who arrived in Manavgat with a 31-5 record in our data and left at 39-13 after an 8-8 week, which took him from 96th to 186th. That is not a collapse. Thirty-two of his 36 earlier matches came at Riccione and Rome, where our field-strength figures were 1,504 and 1,513. That is a record built on smaller fields meeting a deeper one, and the model adjusting. Players with short, shiny records are always the most exposed when the touring pros turn up.
The verdict
Here is the call. Worlds was the week of the year, and the model handled the people below the ceiling well: JW Johnson and Goins earned their climbs, and the numbers match what we all watched. At the very top, Heat Check can tell you who is best but not by how much. Waters’ 17 from 17 is the clearest proof.
The European Open climbs are real but inflated. Fudge, Bower and Schenk have earned most of their new places. Bui and Dy have earned some and borrowed the rest from a form bonus that cannot tell Manavgat from Farmers Branch. That’s on us, not them, and the fix is obvious: weight recent form by field strength, as our regional lists already do. And Shimabukuro will look a good deal better when the PKLStats ratings catch up with the autumn.
Watch Bui next. If she wins at that rate against a Worlds-strength field, the model’s verdict will stand and I’ll stop worrying.
Waters won 17 from 17 and stood still. Sometimes the most informative number in a table is the one that refuses to move.
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine, published by World Pickleball Media Ltd. He follows the global game closely, reporting on news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball…
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