Season rules
Version 2. These rules are published before a season opens and are never adjusted after its field is known. Every board a season publishes is stamped with the rules version it was scored under.
Seasons currently governed by this version: S01 PURE PRICE ACTION (8–27 Sep 2026) · S02 NO NON-PUBLIC INFO (29 Sep – 18 Oct 2026).
The promoter
Read the Tape (readthetape.cc). Correspondence: data@readthetape.cc. A postal address for promotion correspondence is available on request to that address.
Free entry
Entry is free everywhere and for everyone. There is no entry fee, no purchase, no deposit and no account that buys any advantage. The game’s bankroll is paper money: it never converts to real money, and no season award is keyed to it. Nothing about a season can be paid for.
Enrollment
Every desk with 3 completed career sessions by the night before a season opens is enrolled and scored automatically. The roster grows through the trail week and freezes at the open, and never gains a desk mid-season: a desk crossing the floor later enrolls at the next season. Sitting a season out is a one-way exit for that season: the desk leaves the field and its scoring, and its settled calls still count toward each chart’s field facts.
Handles
Board names come from a curated per-season vocabulary, claimed first come from the trail open until the published claim close. A handle gates the name only, never the scoring: an enrolled desk with no handle is scored and never named. Handles are pseudonyms; real names never appear on a board or an engraving. A qualified finisher’s handle is reserved for them for 48 hours into the next season’s claim window, and a podium desk’s handle is reserved for them for life.
Scoring
Each call is Brier scored: the squared gap between stated confidence and the outcome, lower is better. A season score is the mean of all the season’s Brier scores with a stated prior: 25 phantom calls at the season field mean, so a desk’s score is defined from its first settled session and one lucky day cannot carry a season. A chart a desk does not play scores the field’s own mean on that chart or 0.25, the coin flip, whichever is worse: a miss never beats the field on a chart and never beats the flip. A guest’s charts before its first season session are imputed at that chart’s field mean, since the season had not started for that desk. At the close the divisor is 125: 20 sessions of five charts plus the prior.
Positions and ties
Positions are ranked on the season score across all scored desks. Adjacent desks tie when a day-block bootstrap (500 deterministic, seeded resamples of the season’s days) cannot order them at better than the published separation level (0.55). Tied groups share the better position. The printed ordinal is always the true position in the whole field.
No board or position is published until 20 desks are scored; below that floor the field is “forming” and each desk sees its own book only.
Qualification and honours
Honours require zero days off: all 20 season sessions completed, all 100 calls settled. Miss one session and the position still runs. The honours do not. The Calibration Medal goes to the season champion, the best season score among qualified desks; a published tie shares it. Zero Days Off goes to every qualified desk. A field that never formed awards nothing.
Awards
Awards carry no money and no monetary equivalent: a permanent engraving on the honours board, the lifetime handle right above, a named line in the season record with the holder’s consent, and, where offered for a season, a printed copy of the holder’s own settlement slip, posted. Physical fulfilment is opt-in through the game’s statement email, open to residents of Great Britain aged 18 or over, and must be claimed within 28 days of settlement; an address given for postage is used once and discarded. Engraving is automatic and needs no claim.
One desk per person
One person, one desk per season. Playing multiple desks into one season disqualifies all of them from honours.
Void and missing charts
A season is played on the daily game’s banked charts, which are dealt from a deterministic seed and never revised after banking. A chart the game cannot settle for the whole field is scored for nobody; a chart an individual desk did not play scores the coin flip as above.
Integrity
At settlement each season publishes a manifest of SHA-256 fingerprints, one per chart, over the tape itself: the visible candles and the hidden five. The scoring code stamps its rules version on every board it writes. The full record, including the manifest, lives on each season’s permanent page under /seasons.
One figure moved between the spec and the shipped engine, before any season opened: the tie separation level runs at 0.55, not the drafted 0.90, because replaying production cohorts showed 0.90 collapses a hundred-desk field into one giant tie. Stated here because a frozen rulebook that quietly differed from the running code would be worse than the correction.
Two more moved on 2 September 2026, still before any season opened, and the rules version is 2 for it. A chart not played scores the worse of the coin flip and the chart’s field mean rather than the mean alone: at the mean, a desk below the field gained by skipping, so half a board was better off not turning up. And honours need every session rather than 18 of 20: with the position still running after a miss, the honours are the prize for the desk that never missed.