Season rules
Version 1. 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 10 completed career sessions at the moment a season’s trail week opens is enrolled and scored automatically. The roster is snapped once, at the trail 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 misses is imputed at that chart’s own field mean: skipping a hard day neither helps nor hides. 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 qualification: 18 completed season sessions and 90 settled season calls of the 100 dealt. The Calibration Medal goes to the season champion, the best season score among qualified desks; a published tie shares it. A Discipline Citation goes to every qualified desk that put a call on all 20 sessions. 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 is imputed at that chart’s field mean 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.