Getting started with Humpty Dumpty
Win and climb a court. Lose and hold your place. Lose on the top court and you fall all the way to the bottom.
Two variants:
Humpty Dumpty (Individual): new partner every round
Humpty Dumpty (Set Partners): fixed pairs all season
Start with How Humpty Dumpty works.
Season lifecycle
1. Create the event as a League. See Create a Humpty Dumpty event.
2. Set play dates and the opt-in deadline before generating. See Managing rounds and dates in Ladder formats and League opt-in.
3. Generate week 1 and pick the starting order. See Generate rounds in Humpty Dumpty.
4. Score the round. See Scoring matches in Ladder formats.
5. Generate the next round. Winners climb, middle losers hold, top-court losers fall.
Repeat steps 4 and 5 each week.
Good to know before you start
A loss usually costs nothing except the chance to climb. Only the top court is dangerous.
The top court is where the tension is. It is the only place a loss is expensive.
Players bunch upward over a season. Nobody moves down except from Court 1.
Courts are exactly 4 and play one match a round. Any remainder sits out.
With a bye group, Court 1's losers sit out the next round instead of falling (in the default By Position bye mode). If the bye group has only one player, one of the losers, chosen at random, sits out and the other falls to the bottom court.
More courts makes the fall harsher. Falling from Court 1 to Court 8 hurts far more than falling to Court 3.
Score every match before you generate. If a match has no score, the app picks a winner for it.
Not the same as Up and Down the River
Up and Down the River | Humpty Dumpty | |
|---|---|---|
Win | Up one court | Up one court |
Lose (middle) | Down one court | Stay put |
Lose (top court) | Down one court | Fall to the bottom |
That middle row is the difference your players feel every week. If you want losses to cost a court everywhere, use Up and Down the River. If you want a ladder with round robins and a ranked order, use Ladder League.
Settings
Humpty Dumpty has no format settings tile in Event Settings. The one format choice you make is Bye Mode, in the generate dialog (or the auto-generation settings) when someone will sit out. See Byes in ladder formats.