The heart of every game is the point system. Changes to it should not be taken lightly. This article argues for the necessity of tweaking the rules of the 2025 Longevity World Cup to gracefully handle partial data submission.
In the past your best pheno age counted from 2025. Pheno age is calculated from a set of blood biomarkers. When you submitted 3 different results from three different points in time from the year 2025, the best pheno age counted in the final leaderboard. However, an unforeseen need has arisen for people to submit a partial set of biomarkers as updates to their previous submissions. To manage this, we decided to always take the best biomarker submitted throughout the year to calculate the final pheno age.
Why is this not ideal?
Bryan Johnson has been widely criticized for cherry picking his best biomarkers from the past two years instead of publishing the most recent ones. This can be interpreted as misleading as explained by Joseph Everett, creator of the prominent What I’ve Learned YouTube channel.
Why is this necessary?
The key difference with this Longevity World Cup rule adjustment is that it does not result in your best biomarkers to be hidden. In fact this is needed to achieve exactly the opposite.
To level the playing field between the more honest athletes: those who submit all their subsequent measurements even if some biomarkers are worse than in their initial set of biomarkers were and the more strategic submissions where someone only decides to submit new biomarkers if they are strictly better than they were in previous measurements.
This way the competition is made more fair.
What are the immediate implications?
Although there are only a handful of athletes yet with multiple submissions, the point system update did lead to a few changes among those who submitted multiple times.
On the front page, HealthOptimizers’ score is improved from -15.0 to -15.9 years. His ranking stayed unchanged.
This also puts Alan V’s, who was the first ever athlete enrolled to the competition and held the first place for many months, moved up from #12 to #8.
Finally, and perhaps most awkwardly, my own ranking has improved 9 places.
I do recognize and want to point out the conflict of interest in this and I’ll commit to removing myself from the competition as soon as this endeavor gets more serious and it starts to become a problem to ensure the neutrality of the competition. But for now I’d just like to be part of the fun.
Summary
The updated rule for the 2025 Longevity World Cup modifies how PhenoAge is calculated for the leaderboard. Previously, only full biomarker panels were considered, and the best complete result from 2025 was used. From now on, the final PhenoAge will be calculated by selecting the best individual value for each biomarker across all submissions throughout the year, even if some submissions are partial. This allows for incremental updates and ensures that athletes who report regularly and transparently aren’t penalized compared to those who only submit selectively when results are optimal.
For more information on the competition rules please refer to our Ruleset document.
