Deuce
Who builds Deuce, and what we will not do
Deuce Ladder runs tennis ladders: standing rankings where you challenge somebody a few rungs above you, play, and swap places on the result. It is built by Cyril Drouin. {{FOUNDER_BACKGROUND}} One person, named, reachable at an email address that a human reads.
Everything on this page was last checked in July 2026.
In a hurry, the two sections worth your time are what we will never do and how we count. The rest is context.
Leading an about page with that is a strange thing to do, and in this category it is also the whole difference. Go and search for tennis ladder software. What comes back is sites with no author, no company name, no address, no changelog, and a ladder count on the homepage that the site's own public data does not support. One of them created 88 of its ladders in a single day, the day after its domain was registered. When your ladder breaks on a Sunday night, there is nobody to write to.
Why this exists
Cyril Drouin plays tennis in {{FOUNDER_CITY}}, at around {{FOUNDER_LEVEL}}, and wanted what most club players want. Five or six competitive singles matches a month, against people at roughly the same standard, arranged without a group chat and 40 unread messages.
The local options were the usual three.
A club ladder on a spreadsheet. It worked for two months. Then the person maintaining it got busy, the sheet went stale, and nobody knew who was supposed to play whom. A spreadsheet plus a group chat is the real incumbent in this market, and organizers volunteer it in public without being asked:
I tried running a ladder using a spreadsheet, and that was too much work try to keep it updated.
Source: An organizer posting to the r/10s tennis forum, September 2024. Quoted verbatim, including the typo.
Nothing about that is a software problem until you notice the shape of it. The sheet is fine right up until the one person who understands the tabs stops opening it, and after that nobody wants to be the one who touches it.
A team league. Fixed nights, a captain, a roster, a season-long commitment made in advance. Fine if your schedule is fixed. Most are not.
Nothing. In a lot of places, and probably in yours, there is no ladder at all. Not a bad ladder. None.
The format is not the problem, and we did not set out to fix the format. Ladders have worked at clubs for decades. The problem is always the same one and it has a shape: the challenge that never becomes a played match. Somebody does not reply. Somebody sits on rung 3 and stops playing. Somebody wins by walkover for the fourth time and quits out of boredom. Every mechanism on Deuce attacks that one failure. Here is the whole format, and here is the full ruleset.
The decisions already made, and why
Five of them, and every one comes back to the same failure.
You should pick your opponent. One national governing body ships a tennis ladder, the USTA, and its ladder picks your opponents for you. From its own player documentation:
At the start of each 2 week round, players are automatically assigned to 0, 1, or 2 opponents based on their availability.
Source: USTA Flex, published player documentation.
That solves scheduling by removing the choice, and it can hand you nobody for two weeks. We think the choice is the part players want, so we cap the challenge range instead of taking the decision away.
Deadlines need consequences, not reminders. A nudge email is not a mechanism. It is the message everybody has already learned to archive. Every window in a Deuce ladder has an automatic outcome attached when it expires, so a quiet opponent costs themselves a rung instead of costing you a month.
Not much of that is original, and it is worth saying so. Club ladders that are still running have converged on the same two defenses without consulting each other. Across published club rulesets the response deadline lands on 48 hours with roughly one to two weeks to play, and a cap on how far up the standings you may reach is close to universal. An uncapped ladder is a solved and rejected design. Where those rulesets agree with each other, we copied them and left them alone.
A score is only worth what its verification is worth, so both players confirm one. An auto-confirm timer means silence cannot stall you, only real scorelines are accepted, and the penalty for faking one is published in the rules rather than left to an organizer's mood. How that works.
Standings belong to the players in them, so every ladder on Deuce gets a public standings page. No login, no signup, no email wall. You can browse ladders without an account, and so can your club's members, and so can your mother.
Organizers get the dials, not the mechanics. The dials are real ones. Challenge range, which defaults to five rungs up. The response window, 48 hours. The play window, ten days. Level bands, rematch cooldown, decay rate, absence limits up to 21 days, playoff size, match format, and a season of 6, 8, 10 or 12 weeks. What you cannot change is the part that makes a result mean something: challenges go upward only, the range is capped at some number, both players confirm the score, and decay and absence both exist. A ladder without those has a known way to die.
Where we are right now
Deuce Ladder is pre-launch.
There are no players on it. There are no ladders on it. There are no clubs using it. There is no traction number we can show you, because there is no traction.
We are saying it here, in the first three sentences of the section, because you were going to work it out in about 90 seconds anyway. The usual move at this stage is a paragraph about a growing community of passionate players, which is a sentence you write when the number is zero and you do not want to say zero. If a page on this site ever shows you a live count, it will be a real query against a real database, and it will say zero when the answer is zero.
Nobody else in this corner of the market has scale either. In July 2026, not one tennis ladder app in the Apple or Google stores carried more than 15 ratings. The products with real size are web-only and a decade old. Small category, mostly unbuilt, and that is the honest shape of what we are walking into. It also explains why an unverifiable ladder count on somebody's homepage buys so little.
What exists today: the ruleset, the scoring model, the rating method, and the software that runs them. What does not exist: your city's ladder, unless you start it.
How this gets paid for
The answer shapes every incentive on this site, so it belongs on the page about trust.
Organizers pay for a season, and players never pay to look. Browsing ladders, reading standings and looking up courts are free, stay free, and need no account. Pricing itself is not set yet, so there is no number on this page or anywhere else on the site until there is a real one, published for everybody at once.
Which is the reason we can afford to publish zeros. Nothing here is funded by how many email addresses the site collects, so an honest empty state costs us only the visitors who were never going to get a match out of us anyway. Our commitments on data are in the privacy policy and the terms of a paid season are in the terms.
What we will never do
This list is a commitment. If you catch us breaking one of these, write to hello@deuceladder.com and we will either fix it or say why we were wrong to promise it.
We will never invent counts. No inflated player totals, no "thousands of matches played," no rounding 12 up to "hundreds." Read the one-star reviews of any product that does this and they come back to the same two complaints: there was nobody near me, and the person I was matched with never played me. A padded number buys exactly that, and the cost lands on somebody who took a Saturday morning off the strength of a figure on a homepage and found that nothing was arranged.
We will never put discovery behind a paywall or a login. Standings, ladder pages and city pages are readable by anyone, forever. Gating the thing a player needs to see before deciding to play is the most common mistake in the category.
We will never hide behind a contact form. There is a published email address on the contact page with stated response times. Not a ticket portal that swallows your message.
We will never quote you a price we will not publish. When pricing is set it goes on the pricing page, in numbers, for everyone. No "contact sales for a quote" for a club ladder.
We will never fake a shipping history. The changelog starts empty and fills up as we ship. A footer that says 2012 and a blog whose last post is from 2023 is how several competitors currently signal abandonment. We would rather show you a short honest list.
We will never write a testimonial we did not receive. Where this site has a space for social proof, it renders nothing until there is something real to put in it.
We will never hold your ladder hostage. A player can export their own record and an organizer can export a whole ladder, roster plus full match history, in a format a spreadsheet will open, without asking us first. If you leave, you leave with your data. If this company ever stops operating, you will hear it from us in writing with time to get your history out, not from a domain that quietly fails to resolve. The mechanics are in the privacy policy.
How we count
Any number on this site that a reader could check has a definition. Here they are.
Active player. Someone with at least one played match in the last 30 days. Not someone who signed up, and not someone who logged in. Someone who got to a court, played a match, and had the score confirmed by the other player.
Active ladder. A ladder with at least one played match in the last 30 days. A ladder that was created and never used is not an active ladder, and we will not count it as one.
Matches played. Confirmed results only. A walkover is recorded as a walkover and is left out of this figure, because a match nobody played is not a match. That distinction costs us numbers on purpose. Walkovers are the cheapest way to make an activity chart look busy, and counting them is how a platform ends up reporting a healthy month in which almost nobody hit a ball.
Courts. Courts listed in the geographic scope you are looking at, sourced from public data.
Those four definitions sit behind every counter on the site. The numbers on the homepage, the totals on a city page, the activity line on a set of standings, whatever you see on the ladder directory. Same definition each time, resolved by the same query.
Today all four of them return zero, everywhere, because there are no ladders yet. Publishing the definitions now is the point. It means they cannot be quietly loosened later, on some day when a bigger number would be more convenient than an accurate one.
One more definition, which is the number you will not find anywhere on this site.
Registration totals are the vanity number in this category, and they are the number every competitor leads with. They are easy to pile up, and what they measure is marketing. A platform can hold tens of thousands of registrations and produce a handful of matches on a Saturday. One competitor publishes 306 active ladders while its own data shows 278 members in total. Another publishes 27 ladders against 52 active players on the same screen, which reads as failure precisely because the two numbers were allowed to drift apart. So the number we publish is the one that answers the question you came here with, which is whether anyone is playing near you this month.
If a count on this site looks wrong to you, ask. We will show you the query. If you want to see the definitions doing their job, the directory is the place they all render at once, and /join is where they get applied to your own city.
What we want to be true by July 2027
Not a mission statement. Three checkable claims we are willing to be measured against, written in July 2026 so the clock on them is a real one.
- A player in a city with a Deuce ladder gets a played match within ten days of joining.
- An organizer moving off a spreadsheet spends under an hour a month on ladder admin.
- Every count on this website matches the database, including the zeros.
The third one is the easy one, because it is a query. The first one is the one that will be hard, and it does not depend on the software so much as on whether there are enough people in your city who want a match on the same weekend you do.
We will report against these three in the changelog rather than quietly dropping the ones that turn out to be wrong. More questions, answered plainly.
What is current on this page
Every competitor claim above was checked in July 2026 and each one carries a re-verify date in the page source. They are all live numbers on other people's websites, which means they can change without warning. When a claim fails re-verification we cut the sentence instead of softening it, because a page arguing that our numbers are checkable cannot survive keeping a stale one.
What is not settled, as of the same date: pricing is not published, rotating doubles partners are not built, and moving a ladder off a spreadsheet is done by a person reading your sheet rather than by an upload button. Anything that changes shows up in the changelog with a date on it.
Where to go from here
If you want to play, find a ladder in your city and send a challenge. That is /join, and most people manage it on the day they sign up.
If you are the person who would end up running the thing, start a ladder and tell us about your group. A real person builds the first one with you.
And if you are not ready to hand anyone your email, do not. Every ladder on Deuce has a public standings page, and you can browse all of them without an account. When you get there, read the match dates before you read the player count, because the dates are what tell you whether a ladder is actually alive. That holds on anyone else's site as well as ours.