How competitions work

Clubs run several kinds of competition in SportyPlus. This page explains what each kind is and how it decides who wins. To sign up, play your matches and enter results, see Leagues, tournaments and results.

Your club chooses the format and its settings, such as how many points a win is worth. A league's Info tab shows what your club picked.

The three kinds at a glance

Leagues

Most leagues split players into groups. Inside a group, everyone plays everyone else. This is a round-robin, the same system as a football league season. Your club decides how many times you meet each opponent.

A league can be singles or doubles. In a doubles league you sign up as a pair, unless the format pairs you with others (see Padel league, Americano and Mexicano).

A league moves through these stages:

1. Registrations — you can sign up.
2. Draw — sign-up is closed and players are placed in groups.
3. Active — matches are played and results entered.
4. Completed — the final table is set.

Group league

The classic league. You play each player or pair in your group, enter the result, and earn points:

• a win earns the win's points (two by default);
• a loss can earn points too, if your club gives points for playing a match or for each set you won;
• a win can earn fewer points, if your club takes points off for each set you dropped;
• a draw, in sports that have draws (such as football), earns the draw's points.

The club picks these numbers. The table then ranks the group by points.

When two players have the same points, the table breaks the tie in this order:

1. the match between those two players (head to head);
2. set difference — sets won minus sets lost;
3. game difference — games won minus games lost.

In sports scored in points rather than sets, such as badminton or pickleball, read "games" and "points" for "sets" and "games". In sports with one final score, such as football, it is the goal difference. Some clubs check head to head last, after the differences. For more on tie-break rules in general, see Tiebreaker.

Promotion and relegation

When a league runs in cycles (a new league every few weeks, with the same players), groups are ranked from strongest to weakest. At the end of a cycle, the top finishers in each group move up a group and the bottom finishers move down. Your club sets how many move each way. This is the same idea as promotion and relegation between divisions in football, and is sometimes called a ladder or pyramid.

Elo ladder

In an Elo ladder there are no fixed points per win. Each player has a rating, and every result moves points from the loser to the winner. How many depends on how surprising the result was:

• beat a stronger player and you gain a lot;
• beat a much weaker player and you gain very little;
• lose to a weaker player and you lose a lot.

This is the Elo rating system, first designed for chess. SportyPlus uses a K-factor of 32, so one match can move your rating by at most 32 points. Beating a player with the same rating is worth about 16. A draw counts as half a win for each side. The table ranks players by rating.

The How are points calculated? button under Ranking shows worked examples, and the number shown next to an opponent (for example +12 | −20) is what you would gain or lose against them.

Padel league

A padel league is for players who don't have a fixed partner. You sign up on your own and say which side of the court you play, left or right. The league pairs left-side players with right-side players, and your partner can change from match to match. Your results count for you as a player, so the table ranks individuals, not pairs. Points are given as in a group league.

For how padel itself is played, see Padel (sport).

Americano

An americano is a social doubles format, popular in padel and played in other doubles sports too. The group plays a series of short rounds:

• every round you play with a different partner and against different opponents, so over the event you play with most of the group;
• your points are your own: each result counts for both players of the pair, but each of you collects them separately;
• the group has any number of players from 4 to 24. When the number doesn't divide into fours, players sit out in turn, the way a bye works.

Because some players sit out more rounds than others, the table ranks by points per game played, not by total points. Nobody falls behind just for sitting out.

In the app, My court and rotation shows your court, your partner and your opponents for each round, and the rounds you sit out.

Mexicano

A mexicano looks like an americano: changing partners, individual points, players sitting out in turn. The difference is how each round is paired. In an americano all rounds are drawn at the start. In a mexicano only the first round is. Each later round is paired from the standings so far, so players near each other in the table end up on the same court. The games get closer as the event goes on.

So the next round's games appear only once the previous round's results are in. Enter your result straight after you play. Like the americano, a mexicano ranks by points per game played.

Tournaments

A tournament is a single-elimination bracket, also called a knockout or cup. Every match has a winner, the winner goes through to the next round and the loser is out, until one player or pair is left as champion.

• Seeds. The club can seed the strongest entrants, so they can't meet each other in the early rounds (see Seed). Everyone else is drawn at random.
• Byes. A bracket fills only with 4, 8, 16, 32 … entrants. With any other number, some entrants get a bye in the first round and go straight to the second.
• Waiting for the opponent. Your next match shows this until the match before it has a winner. You get a notification when your opponent is known.

A tournament can be the finals of a league, or one stop of a series that counts towards an overall table (see Planned competitions). Then you earn points for the round you reached.

Planned competitions

A planned competition is not a separate format. It is a schedule of leagues and tournaments that the club sets up once, and that keeps running. For example:

• a weekly americano with 16 places;
• league cycles every six weeks, with promotion and relegation between them;
• groups, then finals: a group league followed by a knockout tournament;
• a circuit: a tournament every month, all adding up to one table.

Each league or tournament it creates is a round (the club's side calls it a cycle). You play a round like any other league or tournament.

A planned competition has a fixed number of places. Players who hold one are regulars; everyone else can join a free waiting list. Before each round, regulars say whether they are playing, and places that free up go to whoever on the waiting list claims them first. How to join, answer and claim a place is in Competitions with a waiting list.

How the rounds are grouped

For a league round, the club picks how the groups are filled from the players who are playing that round:

• by last round's result — you start from your group last time and move up or down by where you finished, as in promotion and relegation;
• by rating — players are sorted by their rating and cut into groups, the strongest first. The rating is either your rating at the club or your DUPR rating; a pair counts as the average of its two players.

If fewer people play than the groups hold, the club decides whether to fill the top groups and leave the last one short, or to keep every group and take one player from each, starting with the lowest.

The overall table

The competition's Overall ranking adds up your points from every round. A league round gives you the points you earned in it. A tournament round gives you points for the round you reached. The club can also add bonus or penalty points, for example for attendance.

Results that don't come from a finished match

• Retirement — a player can't continue during the match. Record it under Match options → Retirement. The other side wins.
• Walkover — a match not played because one side didn't turn up or withdrew. The side that was ready gets the win (see Walkover).
• Cancel match — the match is not played and counts for neither side.

In a group league a win by retirement or walkover earns the win's points, with no sets or games counted.

Ratings outside a single competition

Besides each competition's own table, the app keeps ratings that follow you across competitions and friendly matches. They're under Ranking:

• Club ELO — your Elo rating from matches at your club;
• Global ELO — your Elo rating from matches across all SportyPlus clubs.

DUPR ratings

DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating) is a worldwide rating used mainly in pickleball, on a scale from 2.000 to 8.000. If you link your DUPR account, your matches are sent to DUPR. Some competitions accept only players within a DUPR range, or group players by their DUPR rating. See DUPR for how to link your account.

Scoring in different sports

Each competition has a sport, and the sport decides how a match is scored:

The club can change the numbers, for example play two sets with a super tie-break to 10 instead of a full third set. The format shows on the league's Info tab, and the result form asks for the score in that shape.