Deuce
Tennis ladder FAQ
Fifty-two questions, answered in sixty words or fewer. That is a rule we hold ourselves to, not a style preference: where the real answer runs long, the topic gets its own page and this page links there in one line.
Defaults quoted below are platform defaults. Organizers can change most of them, and every ladder publishes its own values on its ladder page. Every number here was checked against the ruleset in July 2026.
Most of those defaults are not ours. Published rulesets from club ladders that are still running converge on 48 hours to respond, one to two weeks to play, and a cap on how far up you may reach. Where they agree, we copied them.
Jump to
- The format, and how it differs from a league (8 questions)
- Challenges, deadlines and scores (17)
- Starting and running a ladder (11)
- Levels, placement and how the rating moves (5)
- Privacy, cost and the practical stuff (11)
The format, and how it differs from a league
What is a tennis ladder?
A standing ranking of players. You hold a rung. Challenge somebody a few rungs above you, play the match, and the winner ends up on the higher rung. Standings move once the score is confirmed. No fixtures, no draw sheet. The full explanation.
How is a ladder different from a league?
A league hands you a schedule. A ladder hands you a list of opponents and lets you pick. In a box league you play everyone in a group of five to nine inside a fixed round. In a team league you play whoever the captains put opposite you, on a set night. Side by side.
Do I need to be good?
No. You need to be able to play a match and keep score. Ladders are split into level bands. You are ranked among people of roughly your standard rather than dropped underneath a former college player. If the placement is wrong, your first challenge reaches anyone in your band and fixes it in one match. How placement works.
Singles or doubles?
Both, with one limit worth knowing before you plan around it. A doubles ladder ranks fixed pairs, so you and your partner hold a rung together for the whole season and cannot swap in week five. Rotating partners is roadmap, not shipped. Most ladders run singles. What organizers configure.
How long is a season?
Six, eight, ten or twelve weeks. The organizer picks one and it is published as {{SEASON_DATES}} on every ladder page. Seasons exist so the standings mean something at the end and so somebody who joined in week nine is not permanently behind. Seasons and playoffs.
Is there a minimum number of matches?
To reach the final standings and qualify for a playoff, yes. Qualification is gated on played matches, not position, so you cannot climb early and coast. The default is {{MIN_MATCHES_PLAYOFF}} played matches, and it is frozen once a season starts. Walkovers do not count toward it. Why we count it that way.
What happens at the end of a season?
The standings close, the playoff runs for the players who met the match minimum, and then 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.
Can I play in more than one ladder?
Plenty of people will. A club singles ladder plus a city-wide ladder at a different level is a normal pairing. Each ladder tracks your rung on its own. Your Deuce Rating pools results from all of them. How the rating works.
Challenges, deadlines and scores
The longest group, and the one worth skimming. Every deadline below has an automatic outcome attached to it, which is the short version of the whole product.
How do I find a ladder near me?
Enter your city and Deuce shows every ladder in it, with the level band, the format, the season dates, and how many players have played in the last 30 days. If the answer is zero, the page says zero. Find a ladder if you know your city, or browse the directory without an account.
How do I challenge someone?
Open the standings, pick a name inside your challenge range, send the challenge. The default range is five rungs above you. You cannot challenge the whole ladder, because uncapped ladders produce mismatches nobody enjoys. Challenge rules in full.
Can I challenge someone below me?
No. Upward only, on every ladder on Deuce. Let challenges run downward and a strong player just farms the bottom of the standings for safe wins. Play a friendly against whoever you like, of course. It will not move the standings.
How many challenges can I have open at once?
Two by default, counting the ones you sent and the ones you received. The cap is there so nobody keeps four opponents waiting while they work out their week.
What if my opponent does not respond?
They have 48 hours. If the clock runs out you get the result automatically, as a walkover. No organizer has to adjudicate and nobody has to email an administrator for permission, One of the better-known rating platforms still makes you do exactly that.
What is a walkover, and is that the same as a forfeit?
Not the same. A walkover is what you get when the other player never answered, or the deadline passed with nothing arranged. A forfeit is giving up after you accepted. Both appear in your record, labeled differently, and neither counts as a played match. Both defined.
How long do we have to play?
ten days from acceptance, with one extension available. Both players are equally responsible for arranging it. If neither of you could get a court and neither of you stalled, the match is voided rather than pinned on one of you. Rule 7.
Where do we play?
Wherever you two agree. Your club, a public park, whatever you can actually get a booking for on a weeknight. Deuce owns no courts and assigns none. Nearby courts are listed on your city page to make that conversation shorter.
Who pays for the court?
You split it, unless your ladder says otherwise. Court fees are between the two of you, in cash or whatever your club uses, and Deuce is not in that transaction.
How long is a match?
As long as the format your ladder picked. One tiebreak set is the default because it fits a one-hour booking. Six formats are accepted, including the eight-game pro set, short sets to four, and FAST4. No-ad is a scoring option inside a format, not a seventh format. The format locks when the challenge is accepted. All six formats.
How do scores get recorded?
Winner enters, loser confirms. If the loser says nothing it auto-confirms, and silence cannot stall your ranking. Only valid scorelines are accepted. An impossible score is not enterable in the first place. Scoring in detail.
What if we disagree about the score?
Either player can dispute inside the confirmation window. The organizer sees both submissions and decides, and the resolution is written to a public activity log. The log exists so a resolution can never look like a favor. Rule 18.
What if somebody makes up a score?
Only valid scorelines are enterable and both players sign off, so it takes two people to file a fake one. The penalty for doing it is published in the rules rather than decided case by case, and it costs the rest of the season. The penalty.
What if I am away for a few weeks?
Declare an absence. You keep your rung, and nobody can challenge you while it runs. Default is up to 21 days at a time, 42 across a season. Without a valve like that, what players actually reach for is silence, and a ladder does not survive much of that.
Will I slide down if I stop playing?
Yes, and that is deliberate. After 21 days with no played match your rung slides one place a week until you play again. It is passive and automatic. Nobody has to report you and no organizer makes a judgment call. It applies to the organizer too.
Can I quit mid-season?
Yes. Withdraw in your settings. Your played matches stay in the record, your rung is released, and the players below you move up. You are not billed for a season you left, and you can rejoin next season.
Can I play the same person twice?
Not straight away. There is a rematch cooldown, 14 days by default. Without it, two friends can trade wins and climb past everybody else. Once it clears, challenge them as often as the standings allow.
That is most of the mechanic. If it sounds like something you would use, find a ladder near you.
Starting and running a ladder
Written for whoever ends up doing the admin. At launch that job is shared with a person here.
How do I start a ladder?
Fill in the application: eleven questions about the group, the levels, and the season you want, which takes about five minutes. Then a person here builds the ladder with you. The first ladder in a city decides whether the second one happens. Start a ladder.
How many players do I need?
Ten you can name. The application asks for that list. Below ten we say so and help you recruit rather than launch something that dies in week three. Twelve is roughly where a ladder stops being the same two people every week.
How do I fill it?
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. We help with the recruiting mechanics, and there is a printable standings sheet for the noticeboard. What organizers get.
What does it cost?
Pricing is not set yet. When it is, it goes on the pricing page in numbers, for everybody, with no quote-gated plan for clubs, and organizers are the ones who pay. Pricing.
We run ours in a spreadsheet. How do we move over?
Send us the sheet, in whatever state it is in. A person does the parsing pass and you approve the result, so this is not a self-serve upload and there is no import button. Your current order becomes the opening standings, and nobody loses a rung they already earned. For organizers.
Can I change the rules?
The dials, yes. Challenge range, response deadline, play window, level bands, rematch cooldown, decay rate, absence limits, season dates, playoff size, match format, and whether movement is a positional swap or a points table. The full configurable list.
What is fixed?
The parts that make a result trustworthy. Challenges go upward only, the range is capped at some number, 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.
Can I run more than one ladder?
Yes. Several ladders under one club, split by level band or by format, is the normal club setup. You manage them from one place and each gets its own public standings page. For clubs.
Do I have to play in my own ladder?
No, but most do. Organizers who play are subject to every rule they set, decay included, and every adjustment they make is written to the public activity log. The log is what makes a playing organizer credible, and there is not much else that would.
What if the organizer goes quiet?
Write to us. The ladder keeps running either way, because deadlines, walkovers and decay are handled by software rather than by a volunteer checking a tab on Sunday night. We can hand the organizer role to somebody else in the group. Email us.
What happens to players who go quiet?
Software handles them, not you. A missed response deadline produces an automatic walkover, inactivity decays a rung, repeated walkovers flag a player as inactive. You do not chase anyone in a group chat.
If that is enough to go on, the next step is the application. Eleven questions, and a person replies inside one business day.
Levels, placement and how the rating moves
How am I placed when I join?
From what you tell us and what your ladder needs. 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. Your first match is where the real information comes from. Placement and rating.
Do you use NTRP, UTR, or WTN?
We accept all of them as inputs and publish an approximate mapping both ways. The mapping is Deuce's own estimate, not endorsed by the USTA, UTR or the ITF, and it does not round-trip perfectly. After a handful of confirmed results your Deuce Rating runs on matches played here. The mapping.
What stops someone sandbagging into a lower band?
Three things. Placement reads the conservative end of what you claim. The rating moves fast on early results, so a mismatched player is repriced within a few matches. And organizers can move a player between bands, with the move logged publicly. How we handle it.
Does my rating drop if I stop playing?
Your rating does not drop. Its confidence does, and a low-confidence rating is displayed as low confidence rather than quietly presented as fact. Your rung is the thing that decays.
What is the difference between my rating and my rung?
Your rung is your position in one ladder, moved by results in that ladder under its rules. Your Deuce Rating measures your standard across every match you play on Deuce. Related, not the same number. Rating versus rung.
Privacy, cost and the practical stuff
The diligence questions, in the order people usually ask them.
Is my data private?
Your name, your rung, your played results and your ladder membership are public on the standings page, because that is what a standings page is. Your email, phone number, exact location and availability are not. You can play under a shortened display name, and we sell nothing about you. The privacy policy.
Do I have to log in to see standings?
No. Standings, ladder pages and city pages are public and always will be. That is a commitment on the about page, not a launch promo. If you are getting back to a ladder you already play in, sign in here.
Is there an app?
No native app yet. The site works on a phone and does everything you need, because a ladder is a small number of actions a week. Native apps are on the roadmap and the links go here when they exist: {{APP_STORE_URL}}, {{PLAY_STORE_URL}}. What ships is recorded in the changelog.
What if my city is empty?
It will say so. Ladders only work at local density, so they start one group at a time. Leave an email address 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.
How many ladders are there right now?
The site answers that better than we can. Every city page and the directory show live counts, including zero, and an active ladder means one with a played match in the last 30 days. Deuce is pre-launch, so in most places the honest number today is none. How we count.
Does this work outside the United States?
Yes. Deuce launches city by city rather than country by country, and the site is English-first everywhere. Court fees, booking and eligibility are whatever your local courts already do. Whether there is a ladder near you is a separate question, and the directory answers it.
Do I need a club membership?
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 on its own page before you join.
Is it free to look?
Yes, permanently. Browsing ladders, reading standings and looking up courts need no account and no payment. Playing in a ladder sits behind whatever the organizer's season costs, and that number is not set yet. The organizer's side of it is under "how do I start a ladder" above.
Can under-18s play?
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.
What if something goes wrong?
Email a person. hello@deuceladder.com, with response times published on the contact page. No phone queue and no chatbot.
What is a rung, a walkover, a pro set?
The glossary has all three, alphabetically, along with everything else the ruleset uses. Longer explanations of rules, scoring and running a ladder live in the guides.
Still not answered
Then ask. Email us and a person reads it. We would rather answer a question once and add it to this page than answer it forty times, which is how most of the ones above got here.
If you would rather read than write, what players get covers the player side at length and the guides go deeper on running a ladder.