Spares and cross-division play
How fill-in players work across ladder divisions: auto-invite scope, spare-up promotion modes, spare-down protection, and public-standings badges.
When a division is short a player, you pull in a fill-in (a substitute, or "spare") from another division for the night. A spare game is recorded without distorting the standings of a division they don't officially belong to.
Sparing down (helping a lower division)
A higher-division player filling in for a lower division stays officially in their home division. The fill-in game is recorded with a temporary standing in the lower division (starting at that division's default rating), and their home standing is untouched. A Div A player helps out Div B for a night, then goes right back to being a Div A player.
Sparing up (playing in a higher division)
Filling in for a higher division can result in promotion — or not — depending on which spare-up promotion mode your ladder uses.
The three spare-up modes
When creating a ladder, choose one of three behaviors. The default is Never.
| Mode | What happens when a score is recorded in the higher division |
|---|---|
| Never | Nothing auto-changes. The fill-in game is recorded but the player stays in their home division. No automatic division change happens at score-entry or at the cycle — moves only happen through a manual organizer action. |
| Defer | No change at score-entry time. At the next cycle, if the player survived the higher division's standings (above the relegation zone and above the min-games threshold), the cycle ratifies the promotion: the home row is retired and the higher-division row becomes official. |
| Instant | The first time a score is recorded in the higher division, the player is immediately promoted — home standing freezes, higher-division standing becomes active. |
Never keeps division sizes predictable — sparing up is a one-night arrangement unless the organizer decides otherwise. Instant is what older ladders used before the three-way setting was added; ladders migrated with spare-up promotion on map to Instant.
How Defer ratification works
Under Defer, the cycle evaluates any spare-up player inside the higher division's standings the same way it evaluates regular members — with one important difference: a spare can absorb a relegation slot but cannot consume a promotion slot. If the spare finishes in the relegation zone, they stay in their home division and the spare row is cleaned up. If they survive above the zone, the cycle promotes them: their earned rating in the higher division is kept (no re-seeding), their home row is retired, and they become a full member of the higher division going forward.
A spare-up row that has not yet been ratified is visible in the higher division's
public standings with a 🪜 badge showing the home division letter — for
example, 🪜 B means the player's official home is Div B.
A spare-up row that doesn't survive the cycle (finishes in the relegation zone) isn't ratified — the player stays in their home division. The temporary higher-division row is then retired at the end of the cycle (see How spares appear on the public standings page). The games they played up still count toward their ladder-wide total, so nothing they earned is wasted.
Sparing up with no division change
Never mode lets players fill in a higher division without any official move. The fill-in game is recorded; nothing changes at score-entry or at the cycle.
Inviting spares
Inviting a player to another division's event doesn't create a standing — that only happens when they play and a score is recorded. A declined invite or no-show never leaves a stray entry in a division they didn't actually play in.
Auto-invite scope for spares
Two ladder-level settings control which divisions a player is automatically invited to when an event is scheduled:
- Auto-invite to lower divisions simultaneously — invites the player to their official division and all lower divisions.
- Auto-invite to higher divisions simultaneously — invites the player to their official division and all higher divisions.
These are independent. A common setup enables lower-only — higher-rated players can fill in where needed — while leaving higher off so players aren't automatically pulled up a tier they haven't qualified for.
Under Defer, auto-invite eligibility stays anchored to the player's official home division until the cycle ratifies a promotion. They're only invited to events within their home's normal reach, not divisions far above.
Spare-down protection
When a player spares down, a separate setting controls whether they can be relegated through that lower division:
| Setting | What happens at cycle time |
|---|---|
| Protected (default) | The spare-down player is excluded from the lower division's relegation pool entirely. They cannot drop further regardless of how they finish. |
| Relegate at cycle | If the spare-down player finishes in the lower division's relegation zone at cycle time, they are demoted one division below where they spared into — treated as a real relegation. |
Protected is the default. Helping out for a night shouldn't put your standing at risk. Relegate at cycle is the stronger option for leagues where organizers want cross-division performance to carry real consequences in both directions.
How spares appear on the public standings page
While a spare is actively filling in for a division this cycle, their row appears in that division's public standings, tagged with a compact badge showing their home division: 🪜 A, 🪜 B, and so on. The full division name appears on hover, so players can see who's filling in and where they're from without cluttering the column.
The badge is tied to that play window. At the end of each cycle, a fill-in row that didn't earn a permanent place is retired — a spare-down that finished safe, a spare-down that was protected, and a Defer spare-up that landed in the relegation zone all collapse back so each player ends the cycle officially in exactly one division. Once retired, the row drops out of that division's standings and the badge disappears; the player shows only in their own division. If they spare into the same division again in a later cycle, a fresh fill-in row is created when they play and the badge comes back for that window.
Retiring the row never erases its games — the matches a spare played still count toward their ladder-wide games total (which feeds the settling-in gate and relegation eligibility) and stay visible to anyone who flips on Show all on the public page.
Rows with zero games played are hidden automatically — an invite or RSVP alone never creates a visible entry.
What's next
- Running a cycle — how to trigger promotion and relegation as an organizer.
- Promotion and relegation — how the cycle decides who moves and who stays.
- Auto-invite — configuring which players get invited to which division events.