Availability Checkboxes and Ideal Play

Many seem confused by what the check boxes on the Desires Edit page are requesting. What you are checking there is not the exact starting times you wish to play. Rather it is when you could be available to play during the coming week. As desirable as the former is for a player, it is unsupportable. The scheduling program needs some flexibility. Remember that here at Hidden Meadows, where two courts are available, ultimately 0, 4, or 8 must be scheduled for each starting time.

Since hopefully you will check yourself as available for many more starting times than you actually wish to play, there is also the Ideal play field where you can indicate how many times you'd like the scheduling program to aim to schedule you to play the coming week.

Many seem to have learned to wait until Thursday to fill this page out. But you can visit this page as many times as you'd like in a particular week. So maybe even smarter is to fill it out tentatively early in the week so that if you forget to visit it Thursday, you are not left unscheduled. But this strategy will create a problem if your availability changes and you forget to correct the initial desires. So you get to pick your poison. Risk having to hunt up substitutes or risk not being scheduled.

Reporting Match Results

The reporting of match results is only needed to help the computer obtain an estimate of everyone's playing strength. Reported results are used to move players on a ladder. The algorithm used for such movement is crude, but still quite sufficient for its intended purpose of obtaining rough estimates of everyone's playing strength. It certainly is not intended to compete with USTA player rankings or Larry Ellison's new UTR ranking system. This is one reason positions on the ladder are never shown.

A happy consequence of not needing super accurate estimates of playing strength is that there is no need for foursomes to be overly concerned when they can not report a +3 or -3 player. As it has turned out, we are getting more than enough reported results from matches completing normally to satisfy the need for rough strength estimation.

So if a foursome wants to stop after just two sets, fine. Or if the foursome wants to keep the same partnerships for all sets played, presumably because there is an obvious strongest player and obvious weakest player and pairing them for all sets will create the most interesting play, fine. Just leave the result as Not Reported or if someone really wants, report it as Irregular. The computer treats either of these exactly the same so going to this trouble will only be for the benefit of humans viewing past results.

It is possible but not easy to report results when a substitute plays. Doing so requires enlisting an administrator to edit the scheduled match. But the potential gain is so small it will generally not be worth the trouble. The crude algorithm used for laddering is such that if, as will most likely happen, the strongest player is +3 or the weakest -3, no changes are made to the ladder. Only surprises create movement on the ladder. If there is a substitute and there is a surprise, a +3 player desiring to be generally playing stronger opponents or a -3 player desiring to be generally playing weaker opponents has a self interest in recruiting an administrator to go to all this trouble.