How Ladder League works
A Ladder League runs week after week on a set of courts. Each week you play a round robin against the others on your court, and where you finish decides whether you move up a court, down a court, or stay.
Two variants
Ladder League | Ladder League (Set Partners) | |
|---|---|---|
Who is ranked | Individual players | Fixed pairs |
Partners | Rotate within your court each week | Same partner all season |
Court size | One court per group | Two courts per group |
Everything below applies to both. The only difference is whether the ladder tracks a player or a pair.
The ladder is one list, not one per court
This is the part worth understanding, because it explains most of what you see in standings.
Every player (or team) holds a ladder rank — a single division-wide position from 1 to N, across all courts. It is not a per-court number.
It is rewritten every week from that week's results, applying the up/down movement.
It carries forward, so standings show someone's position before they have played a single game that week.
It is the final tiebreaker — best starting rank on the day.
The number you see next to a player on their court is derived from it: the app orders that court's members by their ladder rank.
You cannot tell someone's court from their ladder rank. Courts are set separately and can be uneven — 4, 5 and 6 players on different courts of the same league is normal. Rank 7 is not necessarily on Court 2.
Ladder rank is also a different thing from event rank, which belongs to the separate "By Event Rank" method — see How to run a ladder league with "By Event Rank".
A week in the life
Players opt in for that week's date.
You generate the round. The app splits opted-in players across courts and builds a round robin on each.
They play; you enter scores.
You generate the next round. The app applies movement, rewrites everyone's ladder rank, and rebuilds the courts.
How courts get sized
The app distributes opted-in players across courts using a fixed set of rules:
4–7 players → a single court of that size, even 6 or 7
11 players → two courts of 5 and 6, because 11 will not split into 4s and 5s
Otherwise → courts of 4 and 5
By default the groups of 4 sit on the top courts and the 5s below. You can flip that in Ladder League Configuration so the 5s are on top instead — see Ladder League Configuration settings. Any group of 6 or more always stays at the very bottom.
You can also cap the distribution to the courts you actually have. Sizes shift to fit rather than overflow.
Because courts flex between 4 and 6, most rosters divide up with nobody sitting out. That is a real difference from Up and Down the River, where courts are fixed at 4 and byes are routine enough to have their own setting.
What carries over and what does not
Carries over week to week: ladder rank, and therefore your court.
Does not carry over: the round robin itself. Each week is a fresh set of matches against whoever is on your court that week.
Absent players are handled deliberately rather than dropped — see The absence penalty in Ladder League.