A League in Slams is a season-long competition where teams (pairs) play each other in a fixed round-robin schedule, spread across playing rounds. With a lot of teams, a competition like this quickly becomes hard to follow. Groups let you divide the participants into smaller groups that each play their own mini-competition, with separate standings per group.
When should you use groups?
Groups are optional. You set them with the Group size field in the settings of the league part:
- Leave the field empty or at 0? Then everyone plays in one large round-robin, everyone against everyone.
- Enter 4, for example, and have more than 4 teams? Then Slams divides the teams into groups of roughly 4, with a full round-robin within each group.
- Have as many teams as the group size, or fewer? Then it stays a single group.
All groups share the same playing rounds. If you choose 2x for the number of meetings, each group plays both a home and a return round.
Group assignment: automatic or manual
When you generate the schedule, Slams draws the teams into the groups at random. If you want to adjust that split, go to the Assignment tab of the part. There you move teams to another group, or even to another division within the same event (as long as the entry fee is the same).
An important difference in the buttons: Regenerate keeps your manual assignment and only rebuilds the matches. Only Redraw distributes the teams at random again. You can move teams as long as no matches have been played yet in the group involved.
Results and the standings
You enter a league match set by set, for example 6-4 6-2. From that, Slams derives both the sets won and the total number of games. See also entering scores. In the standings:
- Points per team: by default 3 for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. You adjust this per part in the settings.
- Draws are allowed in a league, so a match does not need to have a winner.
- The goal difference is a games difference (games won minus games conceded). When points are equal, this games difference counts first, then the set difference.
Each group gets its own standings table. A league does not count toward player ratings: the standings are purely about the competition points. More on this in how standings work.
Expanding groups later
Do new registrations come in during the season? You can add an extra group without disrupting the existing groups and their schedule. If you turn on the option for automatic groups, Slams forms a new group itself as soon as enough teams are on the waiting list, each time based on the set group size. Does a player drop out? You can replace them without breaking up the team, see replacing a player.
