In T20 cricket rankings, a win is always worth exactly 100 points more than a loss
The formula behind international Twenty20 rankings hides a neat symmetry. Whatever the teams' strengths, victory pays precisely 100 points more than defeat and 50 more than a tie. Add both sides' earnings from any match and you get back the sum of their ratings going in, so points are shuffled between rivals rather than created.
After each game, both teams receive points and a rating is simply total points over matches played. To stay on the table at all, a side needs at least eight matches within the rolling window of roughly three to four years. The older portion of that window counts half, and each May the oldest results drop off, which can reorder teams who have not played for weeks.
The size of the reward depends on the opponent. A winner always collects between 10 and 90 points above its own starting rating, more the stronger the side it beat, so every victory lifts its average. A loser always receives between 10 and 90 points below its own rating, dropping its average, though losing to a strong team costs less than losing to a weak one. Because the totals must balance, one team's gain is the other's loss.
Ties show the logic most clearly. When unequal teams tie, the weaker one usually walks away with more points than the stronger one, because holding a favourite level is a better result for an underdog. The favourite's rating dips and the outsider's rises. Only when the gap is 80 points or more does that flip. The rule for calculating points switches depending on whether teams are close or far apart, yet the payouts still change smoothly.
One quirk: the winner almost always earns more than the loser, the sole exception being an upset where ratings sit more than 180 apart. And history comes with an asterisk. In April 2018 the council gave every member nation full T20I status, flooding the table with minnows, so top teams' ratings since then run much higher and cannot fairly be compared with earlier leaders.
Source: ICC Men's T20I Team Rankings
