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. Ladder League was previously called Switch Ladder League, and Ladder League (Set Partners) was previously Switch Ladder League (Teams).
Two versions
Ladder League | Ladder League (Set Partners) | |
|---|---|---|
Who is ranked | Individual players | Fixed pairs |
Partners | Rotate within your court each week | Same partner all season |
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 and 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 comes from it: the app orders that court's players by their ladder rank.
You can't 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 different 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 splits the players across courts using a fixed set of rules:
4 to 7 players: a single court of that size, even 6 or 7
11 players: two courts of 5 and 6, because 11 won't 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 limit the number of courts with Courts when you generate. Groups grow to fit instead of adding courts.
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 common 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 keep their ladder slot, apart from the absence penalty you set. See The absence penalty in Ladder League.