A 50.25% rate. Five undefeated players. The T'au story at LGT 2026.

LGT 2026 in numbers | Part 2 of 6

A faction average can hide an exceptional top end. T'au and Orks show why win rates, undefeated counts and player conversion deserve to be read together.

T'au Empire finished the first five rounds of LGT 2026 with a 50.25% non-mirror win-equivalent rate. Read only that number and you might move straight past them. Read the player records and a much more interesting story appears: five of their 42 players went 5-0.

Orks also produced five undefeated players, from a considerably larger group of 74. Both factions therefore supplied the same number of perfect starts, despite very different overall rates: 50.25% for T'au and 60.3% for Orks. Neither number contradicts the other. They answer different questions about what happened at the event.

The same undefeated count, a different conversion rate

Five of 42 is 11.9%. Five of 74 is 6.8%. For these two LGT cohorts, a larger proportion of T'au players reached 5-0, even though Orks won a larger share of their non-mirror games overall. An undefeated count measures how many people reached the top record; dividing by attendance tells us how concentrated that achievement was.

T'au and Orks each produced five 5-0 players. That was 11.9% of the 42-player T'au cohort and 6.8% of the 74-player Ork cohort.

The four-win threshold provides another useful contrast. Eight T'au players reached at least four wins, compared with 21 Ork players: 19.0% versus 28.4% of their respective cohorts. T'au had the higher undefeated conversion in this comparison; Orks had the higher conversion to four or more wins. Describing either faction with just one of those measures would miss part of its weekend.

Who was overrepresented among the unbeaten?

T'au made up 4.1% of the active field but 15.6% of the 32 undefeated players. Their share of the unbeaten group was therefore about 3.8 times their share of attendance. This is a compact way to describe their unusually strong representation at the top of the first five rounds.

T'au represented 4.1% of active players and 15.6% of the 5-0 group: approximately 3.8 times their field share.

That ratio is descriptive. It is not a claim that choosing T'au makes an individual 3.8 times more likely to go undefeated. The people, army lists and opponents behind the results differ, and this export cannot separate their effects. It tells us where the exceptional records appeared, not why they appeared there.

There were several routes to 5-0

The 32 undefeated players represented 16 factions. Dark Angels, Necrons and Custodes supplied three each; Grey Knights and Chaos Space Marines supplied two each. Nine further factions supplied one each. The final exported top 100, which reflects later-round ordering as well, included 24 factions.

Thirty-two players reached 5-0 across sixteen factions. T'au and Orks led the count with five each.

This breadth deserves attention without being stretched into a verdict on game-wide balance. Grey Knights illustrate the distinction particularly well: their overall non-mirror rate was 43.2%, yet two of their 33 players reached 5-0. A difficult aggregate weekend and excellent individual runs can coexist. A below-average faction rate does not erase those achievements.

How much can one player change the headline?

Deathwatch provide the clearest small-sample example. Their four players recorded 14 wins from twenty non-mirror games, a 70% rate. Remove the leading player's five wins and the remaining three players recorded nine wins from fifteen games: 60%. One player changes the headline by ten percentage points.

Deathwatch move from 70% to 60% when their leading main-event player is removed. This checks sensitivity to one player; it is not a skill-adjusted ranking.

Adepta Sororitas still recorded 55.6% after removing the eventual champion, compared with 58.1% overall. That helps distinguish a faction result from a winner's personal run, although it cannot measure how strong either would be in a different field.

For anyone following their own faction, the useful reading order is simple: check the average, check how many players reached a strong record, then check the number of people behind both figures. At this LGT, that fuller view turns an apparently ordinary T'au average into one of the event's most striking stories.

About the data

Source: the LGT 2026 main-event placings and pairings exports. Main faction rates use rounds 1-5, exclude mirrors and count draws as half. Player records include recorded byes. The one-player check removes each faction's highest main-event win-equivalent player, with points breaking ties; it does not adjust for player skill.

Follow UKTC and the LGT over the next few days as we share the results, matchups and player stories from the event.