Wu Yize Won the Worlds. The Form Rating Still Says Zhao.
Wu Yize lifted the trophy at the Crucible in May, 18–17 over Shaun Murphy in one of the more dramatic Finals in recent memory. World Champion. Career-defining moment. Front-page news.
He's third on our Form Rating.
That gap is the whole point of building a rating in the first place. Winning the World Championship is a career achievement; it's also one event. Form is the question of what you've been doing across every event for the last twelve months, weighted by how decisively you did it. The math doesn't care which trophy is shiniest.
Why Zhao still tops the table
Zhao Xintong sits at 1,776. He has 80 tracked matches in the window. Same as Wu Yize, but the margins tell a different story.
His most recent headline result: the 2026 Tour Championship Final, 10–3 over Judd Trump. That's not a 10–7 grind or a 10–8 deciding-frame win. That's a demolition over the rated-second player on tour, and the rating noticed. Look at his profile and the season is more of the same: a 10–7 Players Championship Final against Higgins, a 10–6 World Grand Prix Final, repeated wins by 4+ frame margins against rated opposition.
Wu's Worlds run was huge. Vafaei, Allen, Murphy all dispatched at the Crucible. But before May he was building a perfectly good rating, not a dominant one. The Worlds win nudged him up; it didn't catapult him past players who've been beating top-rated opposition by big margins all season.
Trump is six points behind
The other story the data tells is Judd Trump at 1,771, basically one bad match away from Zhao. Trump's loss in the Tour Championship Final cost him real ground, but he's been winning routine matches all season. 62 in the window, fewer than Zhao's 80, but a slightly better head-to-head structure against the field. The rating treats those two as roughly even right now and your eyes probably agree.
Behind them, the established names look familiar: Selby, Higgins, Murphy, Allen. Wu Yize sits in the middle of that pack. Newly crowned, not newly dominant.
What this rating doesn't try to do
We don't predict who'll win Saturday's match. We don't replace the official world ranking, which measures career standing in two-year prize money. We don't reward novelty or punish veterans.
We measure who's been beating whom by how much, over the last twelve months. That's it. If that question matters to you, and if you watch enough snooker, it should, the table below is for you.
The next time the world rankings and the form rating disagree, the form rating is probably telling you something about the present. The world ranking is telling you something about the past two years. Both are useful, in different ways.
The full table updates after every tracked event. The Tour Championship just moved 41 ratings; the next event will move more.