“Show me the top 10 players, and tell me where I rank.”

Two sentences. They sound like the same problem and they are not, and the second one is why this design exists.

Finding the top 10 of anything is easy — you keep a small heap. But telling one player they are #4,328,911 out of 25 million, updated in real time as everyone else keeps scoring, is a genuinely hard query. There is no shortcut: to know someone’s rank you have to know how many people are ahead of them, which means knowing about everyone.