The game picker

The picker chooses four players for the next court so the games are worth playing and the night feels fair. It suggests a game in well under a second, and you stay in charge: take the suggestion as-is, swap players around, lock someone in, or start from scratch.

Using the picker during a club night

When a court is free, the Next Game Prep panel shows the picker’s suggested game - two teams of two, with a par score for how close it should be. Take it as-is or adjust it:

The Next Game Prep panel shows the picker’s suggestion for the next court. Adjust it if you want, or just Start.

• Generate a suggestion. A free court fills automatically. Tap Auto-pick to build a fresh suggestion from the current queue at any time.
• Swap a player. Tap a player’s name to open a Swap with list and choose someone from the queue. Tap Swap to switch the two pairs around. Tap the × on a player to take them out, or tap an empty slot to add one.
• Lock a player in. Tap the lock icon on a player to keep them in place while you re-pick the rest - handy when someone has waited and you want them on next.
• Set the format. Use the Mixed, Mens and Ladies chips to ask for that kind of game.
• Start over. Clear empties the panel so you can build a game by hand.
• Start the game. When you are happy, tap Start. The four players move onto the court and the game goes live.

With more than one court free, the picker still knows the whole room, so it will not strand someone who is needed elsewhere.

See why a game was suggested

Tap the information icon on the panel to open Why was this game suggested? - which players were waiting longest, how the teams balance, and why this combination came out ahead of the others. Anyone watching the board can open it, so there are no “the system got it wrong” debates without the evidence in front of you. If a suggestion still looks off, the same panel has a flag to send us feedback.

Settings

The settings cog on the session board opens that session’s picking settings; the same settings live on your saved profile, so you can set them once for every night (see Set up your session profiles). Sensible defaults work for most clubs; the controls below let you adapt to your room.

Session setup

• Number of courts. How many courts are running in parallel. The picker assigns players one court at a time, but knows the full picture so it does not strand someone who is needed elsewhere.
• Prep panels (1 or 2). “Prep panels = 1” shows you only the next game. “Prep panels = 2” shows the next two so an organiser can stage a game ahead while one is still in play. Most clubs want 1. Set to 2 if your organiser likes to stay ahead of the queue, or you have very fast games.
• Ranking method (Win % or Rating Change). Drives how the Attendees view orders the night-end leaderboard. Win % is the classic “most wins on top”. Rating Change rewards players who beat the system’s expectations - a player who lost three out of four but those losses were to much stronger pairs may rank higher than the player who won three out of four against weaker pairs.

Sticky pairs

Most nights you want the picker to mix everyone around. Sometimes you do not: a pair who always play together, a parent and child, a coach pairing two players for the evening, or a newcomer you want kept alongside a regular. A sticky pair locks two players as partners for that session - whenever both are in a game, they are on the same team.

Sticky pairs are set on the night, not on a profile, because they depend on who is actually playing. Open the settings cog on the session board, find the Sticky pairs section, choose two players and tap Add pair. Each player can be in at most one pair, and you can add as many pairs as you like. Tap Remove to undo one.

You can also unpair straight from the board: a sticky pair’s combined chip in the waiting queue carries a round × button - tap it to remove the pairing for tonight (you can re-pair them any time). It is the same affordance used to cancel a queued special-request four.

What the lock does, and does not, do:

• It only changes who partners whom. A sticky pair still rotates in and out on the same fair-share queue as everyone else - it does not jump them up the queue or earn them extra court time.
• It never forces them on. If it is not their turn, they wait like anyone else; the pair simply sits out together.
• It needs both present. If one of the pair is sitting out, has left, or is already on another court, the other plays on normally with whatever partner the picker chooses. The lock only applies when both are free for the same game.
• They are never split. The picker will not put the two on opposite sides of the same game.

On the board, a sticky pair shows in the waiting queue as a single combined chip - labelled sticky pair, plays together - sitting at the queue position of whichever of the two has waited longest, so you can see at a glance who is locked together:

A sticky pair appears as one combined chip in the queue, labelled “plays together”.

Auto-Pick

These toggles let you promote individual soft signals to hard rules. For fully automated picking we recommend leaving them all off, so the picker has maximum flexibility to build fair, balanced games. It already weighs each of these as one of the factors below, so most clubs never need to override.

The constraints are there for clubs that want to keep an existing house policy in place until the picker has earned their trust - a firm “no straight back on” rule, for example. Turn on the matching toggle and that policy becomes a hard rule the picker cannot break.

• Prevent straight back on. When on, a player who has just finished a game is excluded outright from the next court, rather than simply being down-weighted.
• Force include first queue player. When on, the longest-waiting player is guaranteed to be in the next game even if including them is not the picker’s ideal balance choice.
• Limit to first N players in queue. When on, the picker only considers the front N of the queue for the next game, rather than the whole queue.

When someone builds a game by hand that breaks one of these rules, what happens is set separately, in the profile’s Kiosk mode block - Warn but allow (a nudge) or Block it. See Kiosk mode.

Take particular care with “Prevent straight back on”

With a small queue this can severely limit the picker’s choices and force poor games - too many players get locked out of the next court at once, leaving too few to build a balanced four from. The picker already treats straight-back-on as a soft signal it tries to avoid, so you rarely need to make it a hard rule.

How it decides

You do not need any of this to run a night - but if you want to know what is going on under the suggestion, here is what the picker weighs. It balances eight things at once and picks the combination that scores best overall. None of them is absolute on its own; they are soft signals balanced against each other, and the Auto-Pick settings above let you promote any one of them to a hard rule.

• Expected closeness. Will this be a competitive game or a blowout?
• Skill balance. Is the skill range across the four players reasonable?
• Wait fairness. Have any of these players been waiting too long?
• Gender balance. If you run mixed games, does the team composition reflect that?
• Avoid recent repeats. Have these four just played each other or with each other?
• Partner / opponent variety. Are people getting mixed around through the night?
• Queue fairness. Are players going on roughly in the order they finished?
• Straight back on (avoided). Are players coming straight off a court being put back on immediately?

For smaller groups (six or eight mates on one court) the picker is doing partner-variety and game-balance work that is surprisingly tedious to track manually past an hour of play. For a larger club it is the difference between an organised night and a queue argument.