Getting started with Ladder League
A Ladder League is a weekly league where players move up or down a court based on how they finish. Two variants:
Ladder League — individuals, partners rotate within your court each week
Ladder League (Set Partners) — fixed pairs, same partner all season
Start with How Ladder League works for the ladder model.
Season lifecycle
1. Create the event. Ladder Leagues are always League events. See Create a Ladder League event.
2. Set your play dates and opt-in deadline before generating anything — the deadline counts back from each date. See Managing rounds and dates in Ladder formats and League opt-in.
3. Generate week 1. Choose how to seed the starting order — random, DUPR, standings, or By Event Rank. See Generate rounds in Ladder League.
4. Score the week. See Scoring matches in Ladder formats.
5. Generate the next week. Movement applies, ladder ranks are rewritten, courts rebuild. See How movement works in Ladder League.
6. Correct the ladder when needed. See Adjust the ladder by hand.
Repeat 4–6 each week.
Good to know before you start
Ladder rank is division-wide, not per court. A single 1..N order across every court, and courts can be uneven — you cannot read someone's court from their rank.
Nothing moves until something is scored. Generating a next round off an unscored week just repeats the current ladder.
Absences are forgiving at first. One missed day is free; from the second, 2 positions per additional day. Byes never count.
Pin, don't re-seed, to fix one player. A full seed override suspends movement for the whole division that week.
If you use individual-games scoring, score game by game — a match without per-game scores moves nobody.
Settings that shape the league
These three change the character of the league most, and all live in Event Settings → Ladder League Configuration, set per division.
Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
Movement | How many move up/down per court each week. Default 2 |
Absence penalty | On by default; drops repeat absentees |
Scoring type | Match wins, or individual games — changes what movement counts |
The same panel also holds Group Size Priority (whether courts of 4 or of 5 sit at the top), Partner Match (how many times each pairing repeats on a court, which sets how long a week runs), and optional scoring targets per group size. For every option and its default, see Ladder League Configuration settings.
Ladder League has no Bye Mode setting. Courts flex between 4 and 6 players, so byes are rare and assigned automatically rather than configured. Bye Mode belongs to Up and Down the River and Humpty Dumpty, where courts are a fixed size.
Shared ladder tools
These work the same across all the ladder formats:
Where to go next
Ladder League Configuration settings — every option in the panel
Troubleshoot Ladder League — why the ladder did what it did