HEMA Ratings June longsword update shows rankings still expanding

HEMA Ratings’ June Mixed & Men’s Steel Longsword update did more than add another month to the ledger. It pushed 280 fighters through 888 fights across 7 tournaments at 3 events in 3 countries, the kind of spread that makes the division feel less like a local ladder and more like an international test of who can stay on top when the results pool widens.

That broader pool matters because the system is built to reward more than raw wins. HEMA Ratings uses Glicko-2, the rating method created by Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman, and says the weighted rating is the number to watch rather than rank alone because it reflects both score and confidence. In practice, that gives June’s update extra weight: a few decisive bouts, spread across different scenes, can move reputations quickly when the field is this active and this geographically mixed.

The month’s active-only highlights show how hard it now is for any single national scene or elite cluster to monopolize the top end. Habibi Favilla debuted as the highest-rated newcomer on the main island at 1,327.4, arriving 1,834th in the table from a group of 34 new fighters. Five more athletes returned after at least two years away from the category, another sign that the competitive ladder is still taking in fresh names as well as recycled ones. Aleksandr Kulik produced the month’s biggest upset with a win estimated at just 2.40 percent, the sort of result that can shake the shape of a bracket even when it changes only one line in the monthly record.

The movement was not limited to newcomers. Will Anderson posted the month’s biggest climb, rising from 565.6 to 1,015.1, a jump that underlines how quickly a strong June can rewrite a rating profile. Branden Zipplinger also made a useful advance, climbing from 27th to 23rd with a rating of 1,863.8. Those are not cosmetic shifts; in a system that tracks weighted rating as closely as rank, they shape the credibility of seed lines and the expectations attached to the next event.

The deeper field is visible in the island count as well. June showed 7,521 fighters on the main island and 53 distributed among 6 islands, compared with 7,393 on the main island and 61 across 8 islands in May. That suggests a stronger active core even as the side pool narrowed. Another 53 fighters had been on an island for as long as they had been active in the category, while 67 supporters backed HEMA Ratings on Patreon, helping fund the servers, domain, and email that keep the project running. For a division still growing, June looked less like a settling point than a maturity test.