I have had the opportunity to examine the leaderboard this weekend and I have some preliminary observations.

1. All players are listed at the start of the month, whether or not they have played any games yet. Members start out with score of 2500, others with zero.

2. As of my last check, 4,074 players are listed, of whom 3,331 have scores greater than zero.

3. If there are more than two players having the same score, the one who obtained that score later/last goes to the head of the queue for that score.

4. There is not necessarily a match between a player's score as shown on his card when he is playing a game and his rank on the leaderboard. This is likely because a player's card rank is reset only after a player completes a game but the leaderboard ranks are reset when any player completes a game.

At my last check, the highest score shared by two or more players was 4353 (Zandolino and riccardo). The lowest skipped score (no players having that score) was 212. The lowest gap of two or more scores was at 477-479. The highest shared score and the lowest skipped score will change througout the month and will give me an idea of the shape of score distribution.

The diamonds with the scores make numerical analysis difficult because Excel treats fields containing them as text fields. However, I have learned that I can use Excel's column split feature to peel the diamonds off and convert the scores to numerical fields. I can therefore do histograms and other neat stuff, which will be forthcoming.