Rivals
Rivals are head-to-head records against the people you play most. Not a leaderboard position — a specific, running score against a specific person.
Why it's the good part
Nobody remembers their world ranking. Everybody remembers that they're 14–12 against the person they play every Tuesday.
Ranking is abstract. A rivalry is the thing you're actually arguing about in the car park, and Rivals is the app keeping the count so you don't have to.
How rivalries form
They accumulate from games. Play someone repeatedly and a head-to-head record builds automatically — there's nothing to declare or accept.
Your rivals list is sorted most played first, so the people you face most are at the top. That ordering is usually right: the person you've played forty times is a more meaningful rivalry than someone you beat twice last year.
ALL RIVALS shows the full list.
What a rivalry shows
Tap into one for the detail:
The head-to-head record — who leads, and by how much. Shows as You lead when you're ahead.
Best streak — the longest run of consecutive wins in the rivalry.
Point diff — cumulative points scored against each other, which often tells a different story than the win-loss. A 10–8 record with a heavily negative point difference means you've been winning close and losing badly.
Last played — when you last faced each other.
Total time — how long you've spent on court against this person, which for a long rivalry is a genuinely surprising number.
Both players have to be registered
Rivalries build from games where both sides are registered players — the same condition as PaddleRank eligibility.
Games against guests don't build a rivalry, because a guest isn't a person the app knows. If you have a long-running opponent who isn't on Vallio, none of that history exists. Getting them signed up starts the count from now.
What's free and what's Champion
The record is free. Who your rivals are, in order, your win–loss against each one, how many times you've met, the last result and when. "You're 6–4 against Dana" is the whole point of the feature, and it doesn't cost anything.
The breakdown is Champion. Expand a rival and the tiles underneath — win rate, average margin, current and best streaks, points for and against, time on court together, and how intense the rivalry is — blur behind a lock.
That's the same line the Dashboard draws: the record is free, the reading of it is paid.
See What's Included with Champion.
Where to find them
Two places: the Rivals tab in the Compete Hub, and the side menu. Your Home feed also surfaces rival activity.
Using it well
Check before you play. Knowing you're 3–7 against someone changes how you approach the match.
Watch the point diff, not just the record. It's the better indicator of whether a rivalry is actually close.
Play up. If someone's a tier above you, every win is worth the largest opponent bonus available — and losses cost nothing.