How to read somebody else’s score
A number from a stranger is a fact about the stranger.
A score tells you where a cigar sits on one person's scale, and you do not have their scale. That is not a reason to ignore reviews — it is a reason to read the words rather than the number.
What a score encodes
Their palate, their tolerance, their expectations, the evening they smoked it and whatever they had eaten. A 92 from someone who scores everything between 88 and 94 means something completely different from an 8 from someone who uses the whole scale.
What is actually useful in a review
- Comparisons: "sweeter than X, less peppery than Y" survives translation between palates.
- Construction notes: draw, burn, ash — these are close to objective.
- Whether they would buy it again, which needs no calibration.
- What they did not like, which people are usually more honest about.
Do this: find two or three reviewers whose descriptions match your own experience of cigars you have both smoked, then read only them. One calibrated source beats fifty uncalibrated ones.
The most useful reviewer
Not the one who agrees with you — the one whose disagreements are consistent. If someone reliably rates peppery cigars two points above where you would, their reviews are perfectly readable once you know the offset.
Your own scale is the anchor
None of this works without a record of your own. Reading other people is only useful when you have something to compare against, and that comparison is the whole reason to keep notes in the first place.
Your scale next to theirs
Everyone in Ligero scores out of ten on the same scale, so a cigar card shows an average that is at least arithmetically comparable — and next to it, whether you have smoked it and what you gave it. Reading strangers is more useful when your own number is on the same page.
Read next
Scoring out of ten so the number means something
A score is a sorting tool. It only sorts if you use the whole scale.
People & reviewsWhy average ratings mislead
An average is a summary of people, not of a cigar.
Tasting & notesWhy "would buy it again" beats any score
A number rates the cigar. A yes or no rates it against everything else you could have bought.