Creating a ranking

Hej alla, First of all, a Happy New Year for all of you! My vacations are gone and I now have to come back to my true reality... Databases and PHP. :) A very interesting question for you experts. Let's see if you can help me. I am developing a game with a team and I have to store the scores of users on a MySQL database to create a ranking. I have a MySQL table called ranking and this table has got the following fields: user VARCHAR(12) NOT NULL /* nickname of the user */ mpontos INT NOT NULL /* amount of points per month */ Very simple, huh? Here comes the tricky part... I want to search for a specific user and make a query that is able to identify the user one position ahead and the user one position behind. Something like this: user mpontos UserA 1532 James Brown 1349 UserB 1229 The most important part is that it cannot be any user with more or less points than James Brown. It must be exactly the users with the smallest difference to his amount of points. Do you have any suggestions? The second part of my problem includes the first one and tries to go in a little bit further... Using the example above, is it possible to "ask" MySQL for the actual position of James Brown and the other users on that specific table according to the amount of points? Something like this: user mpontos position UserA 1532 12 James Brown 1349 13 UserB 1229 14 Any suggestions you experts? Thanks in advance!!! Fábio Ottolini