Deuce in short

A standing ranking of players. Challenge somebody a few rungs above you, play, and the winner ends up on the higher rung. No fixtures, no draw sheet. The full explanation.

A league hands you a schedule. A ladder hands you a list of opponents and lets you pick. Side by side.

No. You need to play a match and keep score. Ladders are split into level bands, so you are ranked among people of roughly your standard. If the placement is wrong, your first challenge reaches anyone in your band and fixes it in one match. How placement works.

Both, with one limit. A doubles ladder ranks fixed pairs, so you and your partner hold a rung together for the season and cannot swap in week five. Rotating partners is roadmap, not shipped. What organizers configure.

the maximum. Seasons exist so the standings mean something at the end. A ladder can also run open-ended, with no end date, no close and no playoff, and the ladder page tells you which one you are joining. Seasons and playoffs.

Qualification is gated on matches played, not position, so you cannot climb early and coast. Walkovers do not count. Why we count it that way.

The standings close, the playoff runs, and the standings carry into the next season. A ladder does not cold-start every spring and you keep the rung you earned. Season close and carryover.

Yes, and plenty will. Each ladder tracks your rung on its own, so a result in one moves nothing in another. Your match record is yours and travels with you.

Enter your city and Deuce shows every ladder in it, with the level band, format, season dates and how many players played in the last 30 days. If the answer is zero, the page says zero. Find a ladder, or browse the directory without an account.

No. Upward only, on every ladder. Let challenges run downward and a strong player farms the bottom of the standings for safe wins. Play a friendly against whoever you like; it will not move the standings.

Two by default, counting sent and received, so nobody keeps four opponents waiting while they work out their week.

They have 120 hours. If the clock runs out you get the result automatically, as a walkover. No organizer adjudicates and nobody emails an administrator for permission. One of the better-known rating platforms still makes you do exactly that.

No. A walkover is what you get when the other player never answered or the deadline passed. A forfeit is giving up after accepting. Both appear in your record, labeled differently, and neither counts as a played match. Both defined.

thirty days from acceptance, with one extension. Both players are equally responsible. If neither could get a court and neither stalled, the match is voided rather than pinned on one of you. Rule 7.

Wherever you two agree. Deuce owns no courts and assigns none. Nearby courts are listed on your city page to make that conversation shorter.

You split it, unless your ladder says otherwise. Deuce is not in that transaction.

As long as the format your ladder picked. The default is best of three tiebreak sets, and when court time runs out at a set apiece, both players can agree to a match tiebreak to ten in place of the third set. Six formats are accepted, including the pro set, short sets to four and FAST4. No-ad is an option inside a format, not a seventh one. All six.

Winner enters, loser confirms. Silence auto-confirms on a timer, so it cannot stall your ranking. Only valid scorelines are enterable. Scoring in detail.

Either player disputes inside the confirmation window. The organizer sees both submissions and decides, and the resolution goes to a public activity log, which exists so a resolution can never look like a favor. Rule 18.

It takes two people to file a fake one, since both sign off and only valid scorelines are enterable. The penalty is published in the rules rather than decided case by case, and it costs the rest of the season. The penalty.

Declare an absence: up to 21 days at a time, 42 across a season. You keep your rung and cannot be challenged. Without a valve like that, what players reach for is silence.

Yes, deliberately. After 21 days with no played match your rung slides one place a week until you play. Passive and automatic: nobody reports you, and it applies to the organizer too.

Yes, from your settings. Your played matches stay in the record, your rung is released, and the players below move up. You can rejoin next season.

Not straight away. The rematch cooldown is 14 days by default, because without it two friends can trade wins and climb past everybody else.

If that sounds like something you would use, find a ladder near you.

Eleven questions about the group, the levels and the season you want, about five minutes. Then a person here builds it with you. Start a ladder.

Ten you can name. Below that we say so and help you recruit rather than launch something that dies in week three. Twelve is where a ladder stops being the same two people every week.

With the people you already have: a club list, your park regulars, the group chat that already plays. A ladder needs local density, not a national user base. What organizers get.

Not set yet. When it is, it goes on the pricing page in numbers, for everybody, with no quote-gated plan for clubs. Organizers are the ones who pay. Pricing.

Send us the sheet in whatever state it is in. A person does the parsing pass and you approve the result, not a self-serve upload. Your current order becomes the opening standings and nobody loses a rung they earned. For organizers.

The dials, yes: challenge range, deadlines, level bands, cooldown, decay rate, absence limits, season dates, playoff size, match format, and swap-versus-points movement. The full configurable list.

The parts that make a result trustworthy. Challenges go upward only, the range is capped, both players confirm scores, absence and decay both exist, and a new player's first challenge always reaches their whole band. Why those are fixed.

Yes, and several under one club split by band or format is the normal setup. One dashboard, and each gets its own public standings page. For clubs.

No, but most do. Playing organizers are subject to every rule they set, decay included, and every adjustment they make is written to the public activity log. That log is what makes a playing organizer credible.

Write to us. The ladder keeps running either way, because deadlines, walkovers and decay are handled by software. We can hand the organizer role to somebody else in the group. Email us.

Software handles them, not you. A missed deadline produces an automatic walkover, inactivity decays a rung, repeated walkovers flag a player inactive. You chase nobody in a group chat.

Next step is the application. Eleven questions, and a person replies inside one business day.

From what you tell us. Bring an NTRP, UTR, WTN, LTA rating, ITN, federation ranking or club level and we seed you from it, reading the conservative end of your range. The number is never public, only the band is. Your first match is where the real information comes from. How the systems map.

We accept all of them at signup as your declared level, and publish an approximate conversion table between them. It is Deuce's own estimate, not endorsed by the USTA, UTR or the ITF, and it does not round-trip perfectly. The declared level only places you in a band; after that, your rung is earned on court. The conversion table.

Placement reads the conservative end of what you claim, a new player's first challenge reaches their whole band so a wrong claim is corrected in one match, and organizers can move a player between bands with the move logged publicly. Rule 5.4.

Your rung is your position in one ladder under its rules. A rating (NTRP, UTR, WTN) is an outside system's estimate of your standard, read once at signup to place you in a band. Deuce computes no rating of its own: your rungs and your match record are the whole story. How the systems map.

Your name, rung, played results and ladder membership are public on the standings page, because that is what a standings page is. Your email, phone, exact location and availability are not. You can play under a shortened display name, and we sell nothing about you. The privacy policy.

No. Standings, ladder pages and city pages are public and always will be, a commitment on the about page, not a launch promo. Getting back to a ladder you play in? Sign in here.

No native app yet. The site works on a phone and does everything you need. Native apps are roadmap,

answer stays as it is.

It will say so. Ladders only work at local density, so they start one group at a time. Leave an email and hear from us once, when a ladder exists near you, or be the person who starts the first one. Start the first ladder in your city.

Every city page and the directory show live counts, including zero. An active ladder means one with a played match in the last 30 days, and Deuce is pre-launch, so in most places the honest number today is none. How we count.

Yes. A ladder can be created anywhere in the world, and no country is off the list. Deuce fills city by city rather than country by country, English-first everywhere. Court fees, booking and eligibility are whatever your local courts already do.

A ladder also does not have to be a club. The organizer sets the scope: one club, several clubs, a city, an area inside a city, a region or state, or a whole country. It is published on the ladder page so you know how far you may be traveling. Rule 1.10.

No. Some ladders are club-only and say so on the ladder page. Plenty are open to anyone in a city and play on public courts. Each ladder's eligibility rule is published before you join.

Yes, permanently. Browsing ladders, reading standings and looking up courts need no account and no payment. Playing sits behind whatever the organizer's season costs, and that number is not set yet.

Only in a ladder whose organizer turned it on, and the ladder page says so before you join. There are extra rules about who sees a junior's details and who can contact them. Rule 1.5 and the privacy policy.

Email a person: hello@deuceladder.com, with response times published on the contact page. No phone queue and no chatbot.

The glossary has all three alphabetically, with everything else the ruleset uses. Longer explanations live in the topic groups at the top of this page.