Editing and correcting games

Scores get transposed, the wrong court gets reported, or two players end up recorded on the wrong teams. Any game can be corrected after the fact, and PickleFriend rebuilds the ratings around the change so the standings still reflect what actually happened.

Finding a recorded game

Every game your group has played is listed in your group's game history on the dashboard. Open the group, find the game in the list, and choose to edit it. You can change the score, swap the players on either team, and adjust the game's date and time.

If you need to remove a game entirely rather than fix it, you can delete it from the same place.

What changes when you correct a score

A rating isn't a standalone number — it's the running total of every game that came before it. So when you change a past game, every rating that was built on top of it is now based on stale math.

PickleFriend gives you two ways to handle this when you save an edit (or a delete):

• Isolate — only this game's rating effect is reprocessed. Fastest, and fine when nothing depended on the old result. This is the default.
• Cascade — recalculate this game and every game after it. PickleFriend reverses the affected games newest-to-oldest, then rebuilds them oldest-to-newest with the corrected result in place, so the outcome is exactly what you'd have gotten if the right score had been entered the first time. Slower, but the later ratings come out right.

Cascade matters because a rating ripples forward — an edit doesn't just nudge one number:

• The teams in the corrected game get their ratings recomputed.
• The games those players played afterward can shift too, because their ratings going into those later games changed.
• In a ladder, the recomputed ratings can change standings — and far enough back, even who would have been promoted or relegated.

Edit early, edit carefully

Because the ripple grows the further back you reach, the cleanest time to fix a score is right after it's entered, before dozens of later games have stacked on top.

Some practical notes:

• A cascade rebuild runs as a background process. A big recalculation can take a moment to settle before standings reflect the change.
• You can't edit or delete a game while other games are still pending — wait for them to finish processing first, then make your correction.
• Deleting a game offers the same Isolate / Cascade choice: with Cascade, later games for those players are rebuilt as if it never happened.

Editing a result vs. adjusting a rating

Editing a game changes what happened — the score, the players, the date — and lets the rating engine re-derive the numbers from that corrected history.

Sometimes you don't want to touch the result at all; you just want to nudge a player's rating directly (a manual seed correction, a hand-tuned starting point). That's a different tool. See Manual rating adjustments for when to reach for that instead.

As a rule of thumb: if the game was wrong, edit the game. If the rating is wrong but the games are right, use a manual adjustment.

Next

• Organizer score entry — how scores get into the system in the first place.
• Manual rating adjustments — change a rating without rewriting game history.