What Stars Are, and What They Are Not

Every prediction on Standom is made with Stars. New players reasonably want to know what that means before they commit any, so this article answers it directly and completely.

The short version

Stars are a free scoring unit. You receive them for joining and for showing up. You commit them to predictions. Correct calls grow your balance; incorrect ones shrink it. Your net across resolved predictions is what the leaderboard ranks.

You cannot buy Stars. There is no purchase option, no top-up, no premium bundle. This is not a feature we haven't built yet — it is a deliberate constraint on what the product is allowed to be.

Stars are not money and cannot be withdrawn as money. There is no cash-out. A Star has no monetary value and never converts into one.

There is no stake and no entry fee. Playing costs nothing. Losing a prediction costs you Stars you were given for free, which is to say it costs you position on a leaderboard.

That's the whole model. Everything below is detail and reasoning.

How you get Stars

Four ways, all free:

• Signing up. New accounts start with a balance so you can begin immediately.
• Daily activity. Showing up and playing replenishes your balance.
• Correct calls. The main engine of growth for an active player. Consistently good judgement compounds.
• Occasional bonuses. Streaks, games, seasonal events.

Notice what isn't on that list: paying. If you run your balance down through overconfident sizing, the recovery path is time and better calls, not a payment. That constraint is doing deliberate work — it means a player who commits more money cannot out-position a player who is simply better, because there is no more money to commit.

Why the balance is finite

If Stars were unlimited, the leaderboard would rank persistence rather than judgement. Anyone could commit maximally to everything and let variance sort it out.

A finite balance forces the interesting decision: not just which side, but how much, and whether to play at all. Choosing to pass on a market you can't price is a real decision with a real cost, and it's the decision that separates good players from active ones.

That's why sizing matters as much as accuracy, and why the leaderboard ranks net profit rather than raw win rate.

Bonus Stars, and why some are marked differently

Some Stars arrive through activity that isn't prediction. Those are tracked separately as playable-only balance — usable for making calls, but distinguished internally from Stars earned by being right.

The reason is integrity of the record. The number that should determine your leaderboard position is the one that reflects your judgement. Keeping the sources distinguishable means a player who has been genuinely good and a player who has simply been present are not indistinguishable at the top of the board.

What Stars cannot do

Being explicit, because vagueness here would be a disservice:

• They cannot be purchased with money.
• They cannot be sold, transferred or gifted between accounts.
• They cannot be withdrawn, exchanged for currency, or converted to any cash equivalent by you.
• They do not accrue value, interest, or ownership of anything.
• They are not an asset, a security, a token, or a holding.

A Star is a point in a game. It is closer to a chess rating than to a chip.

Is this gambling?

No, and the specific reasons matter more than the answer.

There is no stake. Gambling requires risking something of value. Stars are given to you at no cost and cannot be bought, so a losing prediction risks nothing you paid for.

There is no cash-out. There is no path from a Standom balance to money in your account.

There is no house edge. Prices always sum to 100 across Yes and No, with no margin built in for us. We do not take the other side of your prediction; an automated market maker quotes both sides and other players fill them.

What Standom is: a free game where the scoring unit is a probability judgement, and the measure of skill is whether your judgements are calibrated over time.

What about the weekly leaderboard?

We run a weekly contest where the top of the leaderboard receives a recognition prize. Three things are true about it and worth stating plainly:

• Entry is free and automatic. There is no purchase, no fee, no stake, and no way to buy a better position.
• It is decided on performance, not chance — ranked by results across settled predictions.
• It does not change what Stars are. They still cannot be bought, sold or withdrawn.

Full details, eligibility and rules are in the Terms of Service, and the contest itself lives inside the app for signed-in players. If you never look at it, nothing about the game changes.

Playing well with a free currency

A closing note, because the fact that Stars are free leads some people to play them carelessly.

A free currency with a finite balance behaves exactly like a scarce one for every decision that matters. Committing your whole balance to one conviction is a bad idea for the same reason it would be with anything else: you'll be sitting out the next three weeks of markets while it resolves, including the ones you'd have priced well.

Treat the balance as your capacity to participate. That framing gets sizing right without any mathematics.

New to the platform? Start with a beginner's guide to cricket predictions, or read what a prediction price actually means before your first call.