What you do on day one
About twenty minutes, most of it deciding the rules. After that the ladder is the players’ to move, and the jobs you are doing now stop being jobs.
- 1Start the competition
Give it a name. Creating it is what makes you its organiser — there is nobody to ask. You also pick the time zone, which is what every deadline is counted in.
- 2Set the rules once
How many places above someone may challenge, how long a match has to be played, the format and target games, the tiebreak, golden point or advantage, what a walkover counts as, and where a late joiner starts. Match what your ladder already does. They fix themselves when the first challenge is made, so a season cannot change meaning halfway through.
- 3Share one link
One link for the whole club, which you can put in the group chat. It never needs to be reissued, and if it ends up somewhere you did not intend you can replace it, which stops the old one working.
- 4Let them in
Everyone who opens it fills in their details and lands in your queue. You admit them, or you do not. Nobody joins a ladder without an organiser saying yes.
- 5Set the starting order
Put them in the order they already stand in. This is the only place your existing ladder is typed in, and it is typed once.
- 6Start it
From that moment players challenge each other and the ladder moves on results, not on you.
Moving a ladder you already run
Nobody is imported, and that is not a limitation to work around. A player needs an account to answer a challenge and enter a score, so a ladder full of people who have never opened Play would be a list, not a competition.
- You do not have to wait for everybody
- Open a signup window — a week is plenty — and start with whoever has signed up, in the order they already stand in relative to each other. The people who take longer join at the bottom, which is the rule for any late joiner anyway.
- Old results do not come across, and do not need to
- A ladder’s history is its current order. That is what you type in at step 5, and from then on every match is on the record.
- The spreadsheet stops being the truth on day one
- Not gradually. Once the ladder is started, the app is where it lives, and running both for a while is the one thing that reliably goes wrong.
The jobs that quietly disappear
- Updating the ladder
- Results move people. There is nothing to retype and no version that is three weeks behind.
- Answering “who am I allowed to play?”
- Everyone sees their own range, and why anyone out of it is out of it.
- Chasing scores
- Either player can be the one who reports, and matches that were never played surface on their own rather than sitting there being ignored.
- Being the only one who can fix anything
- A wrong score is corrected in the app. The ladder recalculates from where it is now, matches played in between are kept, and what changed and why is on the record.
- Doing it alone
- A ladder can have more than one organiser, and an organiser does not have to be a player. You can hand it over entirely, which is also what lets you leave.
What it costs
Nothing today. Play is early, and running a ladder on it is free while it is. When there is a charge it will be for the right to run competitions — held by one person, for a number of competitions a year — rather than per player, so a ladder growing never costs an organiser more and nobody has to collect anything from anyone.
Do this first
Before you show anybody, put Play on your own phone — it is where you and every player will actually use it. On an iPhone, add it from the main page rather than from any other, because an iPhone remembers whichever page you were looking at.
Starting a competition asks you to sign in first, and for your own details, because you are also somebody a player may need to reach. Back to Play.