Creating and switching groups

A group is a saved roster of players plus the settings that go with it. Your Tuesday night drop-in, your competitive ladder, your kids' clinic — each can be its own group, with separate players, ratings, schedule, and defaults. One account holds as many groups as you want, but you work in one active group at a time.

What's in a group

Nothing leaks between groups. Each one owns its:

• Players — the roster lives in the group; adding someone to one group doesn't add them to another.
• Subgroups — flights, squads, or skill sections within the group.
• Ratings and history — scores and Elo are tracked per group, so a casual group and a serious league never mix standings.
• Schedule and sessions — events and saved mixer sessions belong to the group.
• Settings — rating, game, and policy defaults are configured per group (see below). A group's ladder shape — individual vs team mode, divisions, promotion counts — is chosen when you set the group up as a ladder.

Create a group

1. From the dashboard, open the Groups page.
2. Press Create Group.
3. Enter a name (a description is optional) and save.

The new group becomes your active group right away. Setting up a competitive season instead? Use Create Ladder on the same page — that's covered in What is a ladder league?.

Switch the active group

The group switcher sits in the site header, available on the dashboard and the Mixer. Pick a group there and every page shifts to reflect it — its roster, its schedule, its sessions.

Your choice sticks: the active group is remembered when you sign back in, so you land where you left off.

Where group settings live

Group-level defaults — ratings, game defaults, and policy — are configured in the dashboard's Group Settings (open it from the sidebar). They're stored on the group itself, so changing a setting in one group never touches another.

Scope	Examples	Where it's set
Per group	Roster, rating defaults, game defaults, policy, schedule	Group Settings
Per account	Your profile, email preferences	Account settings

Pick the right active group first, and everything after — adding players, mixing, recording scores — lands where it should.

How many groups can you have

A free account holds 1 group (up to 19 players); Pro and Club unlock unlimited groups and players. If you're near your plan's group limit, check whether any old or test groups can be archived or deleted. A group's players and game history are gone once it's deleted, so export anything you need first.

What's in Group Settings

Each group has a Group Settings modal in the dashboard sidebar with five tabs.

Ratings — controls for rating decay (on/off, rate, exponential growth), the group timezone, public ratings page visibility, Team Rating Mode (individual weighted average vs team entity), and calculation parameters: default rating, scale, K-factor, placement games (per player and pool-wide), highest-player responsibility %, win bonus, and the experimental protect-winner toggle.

Game Defaults — sets the scoring rules that pre-populate score entry: rally scoring, win-by-two, target score, and typical game duration. Also houses Launcher Settings (see below).

Policy — a free-text field for your league code of conduct, payment terms, cancellation rules, or any text you want players to see. When filled in, a "Policy" tab appears on the public ratings page and a "League Policy" button appears on each event page. Leave it blank to hide both. For ladders, the policy is shared across every division — saving it from any division updates the same value.

Ladder — visible only for ladder leagues. Covers promotion/relegation counts, min-games eligibility, auto-invite scope, spare-up promotion mode, and spare-down protection. See Running a cycle for what those settings do.

Sub-Organizers — invite another PickleFriend account by email to help manage this group. Sub-organizers can manage players, run mixers, enter scores, and manage events. Only the group owner can add or remove sub-organizers. See Collaborators for full detail.

Launcher Settings

Inside the Game Defaults tab, Launcher Settings let you pin a mixing algorithm configuration to the group. When enabled, launching a mixer from the dashboard or an event page always starts from those settings — overriding whatever was last used on this device. Leave it off to keep the device-remembered behavior.

You can paste a preset code (copied from the mixer's Custom Presets) to import a full algorithm configuration in one step.

For every Group Settings field, see Group Settings reference.

What's next

• Players — add, edit, and bulk-import the roster for your active group.
• Group Settings reference — every Ratings, Game Defaults, and Policy field explained.
• Collaborators — invite a sub-organizer to help run a group from their own account.
• Accounts and your data — what a free account unlocks and how your data is handled.