Individual vs team mode

When you create a ladder, choose its entity mode: track individual players or fixed teams. The choice changes what carries a rating and how movement works — get it right before your first cycle.

Individual mode

Each player carries their own rating and moves between divisions on their own. Partnerships are formed fresh each session by the mixer — you're not locked to one partner.

Good for open clubs and drop-in groups where partners rotate every session, or any league where you want each person ranked on their own merit.

In individual mode, a player's division is wherever they currently have an active standing. Promotion and relegation move people.

Team (entity) mode

A fixed partnership is the rated unit. "Alice & Bob" is a single entity with one rating, separate from "Alice & Carol." The team's combined results determine its standing and whether it moves up or down.

Good for partner leagues where pairs sign up together and play the season as a unit, or competitive doubles where the pairing is what's being ranked.

A few things that surprise people in team mode:

• Switching partners starts a new team. "Alice & Bob" and "Alice & Carol" are different rated entities with separate histories.
• Reuniting restores history. If a pair splits and later plays together again, their original team's rating and record come back — it isn't lost.
• Custom team names can be shown in standings instead of "Alice & Bob".
• Individual per-player ratings still tick along as a secondary stat, but the team rating is what drives standings and movement.

A stray team row in a division they don't play in

A team's rated row is created the moment the pair is formed — so the team name can be captured — which means inviting a pair to an event in a division they don't belong to creates a row there right away, before they've played a single game. If that pair then drops out without playing, the empty row lingers in that division's standings.

On the dashboard ladder view these show up with a 🪜 pill and the team's real home division (e.g. 🪜 B); hover it and the tooltip explains the row is an event-invite leftover. You don't need to do anything — the next cycle clears these rows automatically. It isn't a duplicate team, and there's no need to delete it by hand.

Which should I pick?

If your group…	Choose
Mixes partners every session	Individual
Signs up as fixed pairs for the season	Team
Wants each person ranked individually	Individual
Wants the partnership ranked as a unit	Team

Set this when creating the ladder. Switching modes mid-season is not a casual change.

What "reuniting restores history" actually means

A reunited pair gets their original team record back. Here's what that means precisely — and the one case where it doesn't apply.

When a prior row exists with games played

If "Alice & Bob" previously played in their division, their team_ratings row is preserved when they split — inactive, rating intact. Once they partner again and a score is recorded, that row reactivates exactly as it was:

• Rating — restored to the value at the time of the split (the team's hidden MMR, unaffected by whatever Alice or Bob did separately).
• Seed rating — unchanged.
• Games played, wins, losses — all carried forward.
• Decay state — restored. Any decay the row had accumulated before going inactive stays in place; it clears only when they play a game together.

When the prior row has zero games

If the pair was registered or seeded but never played a scored game together, the row has no established baseline. On reactivation it keeps whatever rating it was created with — typically the division default. If an organizer manually moves the pair to a new division with an explicit seed rating, that seed is applied at move time. No historical data is lost because there was none.

Decay on reunion

If Alice & Bob reunite mid-cycle but don't play before the cycle closes, their newly-active row counts as "zero sessions this cycle" — the same as any other active team that sat out. Depending on your decay and activity-gate settings, that can mean a small decay hit at cycle time. Playing together at least once in the cycle avoids it.

How this interacts with partner splits

When a pair splits and one player forms a new partnership, the new pairing starts at the division default rating. The old team's rating is not transferred. Each unique (player A, player B) combination is a separate rated entity.

Next

See Divisions and tiers for how the structure is laid out, then Promotion and relegation for how movement works.