How it Works
A quick reference for how standings, percentages, and tournaments are calculated on Tri-Star Pickleball.
Tri-Star supports two ladder-league modes — Court Promotion and Dynamic Ranking — alongside Free Play with point-differential standings and Round Robin tournaments with seeded playoffs. This page explains how each system calculates standings, when sessions affect your stats, and how seeding works.
Ladder Leagues — Steps
Your “step” is where you sit on the ladder. Lower is better — step 1 is the top court.
Every ladder group defines a range of steps (for example 1–15) and how big a move a round produces. Two rules drive your next-session step:
- Finish 1st on your court — move up by the group's Step Move Up value (typically 1).
- Finish last on your court — move down by the group's Step Move Down value (typically 1).
- Anything in between — your step stays the same.
Your step is then clamped to the group's configured range (so you can't move above step 1 or below the lowest step). New members start at the group's New Player Start Step, which admins set in the group's preferences.
Two modes are available per group:
- Court Promotion — each court plays through a session, then 1st place moves up one court and last place moves down one court. Players carry their specific court assignment forward between sessions that happen on the same day. Your step and Points % are still updated after every Court Promotion session — the court-move just decides where you start next time, not whether your stats count.
- Dynamic Ranking — after each session, everyone's step and Points % are updated, and courts are re-seeded from scratch by overall ranking at the start of the next session.
Ladder Leagues — Points %
Your Points % is a rolling average of the share of points you've won across the group's most recent sessions.
Each group sets a Pt % Window — the number of recent sessions that count toward your percentage. If the window is 14, only the last 14 sessions affect it. Older sessions fall off as new ones take their place.
Within that window:
“Points possible” for each game is the higher of the two team scores (so a game to 11 contributes 11 points possible, even if the loser scored 4). Your side's actual score counts toward “points scored.”
Imported History
If a group admin imported your historical stats via the Import Steps tool, your imported Points % is treated as virtual past sessions inside the rolling window until real sessions fill it up. Concretely:
- Say your imported stats are 74.72% over 14 sessions, and the group window is 14.
- After your first real session (where you scored 60% of your points), the window holds 13 virtual imported sessions at 74.72% and 1 real session at 60%.
- Your new Points % comes out to roughly 73.67% — mostly the imported baseline with a small tug from the real result.
- After 14 real sessions the imported contribution is zero, and Points % is purely your real play.
The “Sessions played” count shown per group is also capped at the window — so a member who has played 16 sessions in a group with a 14-session window will show 14. That way the number matches what actually influences the percentage.
Free Play — Point Differential
Free Play groups don't use steps or percentages. Standings are based on wins, losses, and point differential across a rolling window of recent sessions.
For every match you play in a free play session, the system records the score of both teams and credits you with the point margin:
Your differential accumulates across every match in the group's rolling window (defaults to 14 sessions). A win by 11–3 contributes +8. A loss of 7–11 contributes −4. Sessions outside the window drop off automatically as new sessions happen.
The leaderboard sorts by wins first (descending), then by point differential (descending) — so two players with the same W-L are broken by who played the closer games.
Tournaments
Tri-Star tournaments run Round Robin with playoffs. Each event can run multiple divisions in parallel (for example Men's 3.5 and Mixed 4.0).
Round Robin with Playoffs
Teams are split into pools (up to six per pool). Every team plays every other team in its pool. Top finishers advance to a playoff bracket:
- 1 pool → top 4 advance.
- 2 pools → top 3 from each advance.
- 3 or more pools → top 2 from each advance.
The playoff bracket uses snake-seeding so the best finishers from different pools are spread across the draw. A third-place game is always played. The organizer can also opt into a best-of-three final. Pool play and playoff games can have different point targets (for example pool to 11, playoffs to 15) — the organizer picks both when creating the tournament.
Divisions & Seeding
Every tournament can offer multiple divisions — any combination of gender (Men's / Women's / Mixed), skill band (3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5+), and age group. Each division generates its own independent bracket or pool set. A single registration form lets teams sign up for the division that fits them.
Seeding for the bracket is taken from the seed field on each registration — the organizer can set it explicitly, or leave it to fall back to registration order. Playoff seeding from round-robin pools uses the standings within each pool (wins, then point differential, then head-to-head).