What is a ladder league?

A ladder league turns a regular group into an ongoing, competitive season. Instead of one night of matchups that resets the next time you play, a ladder remembers where everyone stands and moves people between skill tiers over time.

The core idea

• Players (or fixed teams) are sorted into divisions by skill — Div A at the top, then Div B, Div C, and so on.
• You play and record scores within your division. An Elo rating tracks how you're doing, based on actual game results — not just wins and losses, but margins too.
• Periodically the organizer runs a cycle: the strongest players in each division get promoted up a tier, and the weakest get relegated down.
• Over a few cycles, everyone settles near players of similar ability, so games stay close and competitive at every level.

What makes it different from a plain mixer

A normal mixer session is about tonight — fair, fresh matchups for the people in the room. A ladder is about the season:

Plain mixer	Ladder league
Resets each session	Carries standings forward over time
One pool of players	Multiple skill-tiered divisions
No long-term consequence	Promotion and relegation between divisions
Optional ratings	Ratings drive the standings and movement

You still run each ladder night using the same mixer engine — mix by rating to keep matchups tight, or run a casual mix. The ladder layer sits on top, tracking standings and handling movement between cycles.

Try a ladder-style mix without divisions

You don't have to commit to a full ladder league to get a taste of ladder-style play. You can approximate it inside a single normal group using the mixer's Rating Isolation preset:

1. Run a regular group and give your players ratings — enter known numbers (a DUPR-style figure works fine), or just record scores for a few rounds and let ratings build from results.
2. Open the mixer's preset picker and choose Rating Isolation.
3. Mix as usual.

Because Rating Isolation pairs and opposes players of similar rating (and relaxes the usual "fresh partners and opponents" rules to do it), your strongest players tend to land on the same court game after game, your next tier shares the court below, and so on — a soft, emergent "court ladder." As scores come in, ratings shift, so an overperformer drifts up to a tougher court next mix and an underperformer drifts down. Movement happens mix by mix, driven by results.

It's a great way to feel out ladder-style competition before setting up real divisions. The differences that matter:

• The court grouping is soft and emergent, not locked divisions — the engine clusters by rating but doesn't fence players into tiers.
• There's no cycle and no automatic promotion/relegation — moving "up" or "down" just changes which court you cluster onto next mix, not a tracked tier.
• Everyone stays in one rating pool, so the public ratings page shows a single flat leaderboard rather than a real ladder's per-division standings.

Good news: a couple of things you might assume are ladder-only aren't. Inactivity decay and a public ratings page are both ordinary group rating settings — switch them on for any group, no ladder required.

When you're ready for the structured version — fixed divisions, automatic promotion and relegation, and per-division public standings — set up a real ladder league below.

What you get — free

• Unlimited divisions and players, with no per-player fees.
• Automatic promotion and relegation with sensible start ratings.
• Elo for individuals or fixed teams.
• Inactivity decay so stale standings don't block active players.
• Cross-division spares that don't distort home-division standings.
• A public standings page players can check without logging in.

Next

Before you create a ladder, decide whether you're rating individuals or fixed teams — it shapes everything else. See Individual vs team mode.