Running a pool league

A club league is the simplest competition there is to run, and the one that keeps players coming back week after week. Most of the work is in the decisions made before the first match; once those are settled, a season mostly runs itself. This is a season from start to finish, with the choices worth making along the way.

Before the season: the format

• Who plays whom. In a single round robin everyone plays everyone once; in a double round robin, twice. With ten players a single round robin is nine rounds and a double eighteen. With an odd number of players one sits out each round, and a single round robin takes as many rounds as there are players.
• How many a week. Each round is one match for every player. Two rounds on a match night gets through a double round robin of ten players in nine weeks; one round a night takes eighteen.
• The race. The longer the race, the more the better player wins — and the longer the evening. Between club players a race to 5 usually fits two matches into a night; a race to 7 takes an hour or more on its own.
• The points. Whether a hill-hill loss earns a point, and which tie-breakers settle level players: see how a league table works.

Before the season: the house rules

The arguments a league has are almost always about something nobody settled in advance. Agree these before the first match, and write them down where every player can read them:

• Which rules. World rules, or the club's own — and for 8-ball, what the 8 on the break means; for 10-ball, whether a 10 called early in a combination wins. The rules in short has the usual differences.
• Who breaks. Alternating, or the winner of each rack.
• A player who does not turn up. How long the opponent waits, and whether the match is given to them by the full race — 5–0 in a race to 5 — or played later.
• Matches played late. Whether a match can be moved, and by when it has to be played.
• A player who leaves. Whether what they played stands, or everything is wiped out — the table guide explains the difference.
• Who enters the results, and how quickly after the match.

During the season

The weekly work is the results. Each one goes in as soon as the match is over, from a phone at the club, and the table follows at once. A wrong score is corrected rather than argued about: the table is worked out again from the results, so a correction puts everything in its right place.

Two things are worth watching. A player who has not played for weeks has usually lost interest, and it is better to talk to them early than to find a dozen unplayed matches at the end; on CueResults a league can warn its organiser when someone goes a set number of days without a match. And a season that falls behind its weeks rarely catches up by itself — a night set aside for catching up does more than any reminder.

The end of the season

When the last match is in, the table is the result. Players still level on everything are placed by the organiser, and then the season is closed: the final places are kept, and each player's record shows where they finished, with a medal for the top three.

Then comes the most important decision of the season — when the next one starts.

On CueResults

Running a league here costs nothing. Clubs join by invitation for now: write to [email protected] with the club's name, its city and the league you want to run. You add the players, the fixtures are drawn week by week, and from then on the results you enter are the table.