Ranking & Points System

Because everyone partners everyone, we rank individual players, not fixed teams. Each player's record is built from every match they play across the season, with different partners. The player who wins the biggest share of their matches gets the top seed. The three events — Men's Doubles, Women's Doubles, and Mixed — each keep their own separate standings.

Best of 3 sets, first to 4 games. At 3–3, a 5-point tie-break decides the set and is recorded as 4–3. Win 2 sets to win the match. A tennis match can't end in a tie — there's always a winner — so "draws" never appear in your record; ties only happen in the standings table and are broken by the steps above.

Read across a row for the rule; the full detail and the rules crosswalk are below.

Guard-rails, so a void can't be used to dodge

• Organizers approve every substitution — the same control that governs a cancelled void — and it's the organizers' consent that clears a league member to stand in. A sub can't be self-declared to duck a likely loss.
• Opponents must agree in advance — without their consent, the absence is simply a walkover loss.
• A hard cap of 2 subs per player per season, and the stand-in should be of comparable standard (organizers' call) — so the void can't be used to repeatedly shed tough nights or to slot in a ringer.
• Guest or league member — no credit either way. The stand-in can be an outside guest or another player from the league; the sub match never touches the sub's own ranked line (no games, no win or loss, no rank or record change), so no one can climb the ladder just by playing extra.

Reading it: Player S is a 75% winner (3 of 4) on the nights he actually played, and the substitution judges him on exactly that. Treated as a walkover, the same missed night adds a loss, dropping his win rate to 60% (3 of 5). His games won are identical (30) either way — it's the extra scheduled loss that moves his Win %, so a walkover punishes an arranged, consented absence as if he'd ducked. The stand-in's result, win or lose, never lands on his line — nor on the stand-in's own, if they're a league member.

Cancelled Weather / mutual, no fault

Different cause, different handling: the match is voided by the organizers — excluded from the record of everyone in it, and it doesn't count as a scheduled match either, so their Win % isn't affected. Nobody is punished for something outside their control. Only organizers can void a match, so it can't be used to dodge a likely loss — and a double no-show is not “no fault,” so it never qualifies.

Retirement / injury A match that starts but can't finish

Different from a walkover, because tennis was played. If a player can't continue — injury or illness — the games already won stand for everyone, the pair that can't continue forfeits the rest, and their opponents are credited the win. The match counts as scheduled and played, carrying whatever games were banked up to the stoppage. A match stopped by weather that can't be resumed is treated as a cancellation instead — no fault, voided.

Two of the matches weren't played normally — impact on every player in the pair

Doubles means four players — two pairs in every match, so an abnormal match lands on all of them, not one. Here's exactly what each did to each player's record.

Reading it: a walkover credits the pair that showed a win and charges the no-show's pair a loss — no games either way. Because it still counts as a scheduled match, that win lifts the winners' Win % and the loss drops the no-show side's; the zero games don't matter here, since a walkover is 0/0 for Games %. A cancelled match is voided for everyone in it and isn't a scheduled match, so Players 5 & 6 show 4 scheduled, not 5. Note Player 3 showed up but still takes the loss because the pair couldn't field a team — that's exactly the case a consented substitute is designed to rescue.

Reading the tiebreaks: Win % sets the order. Player 1 and Player 4 both win 60%, so Games % breaks it — Player 1's 53.1% clears Player 4's 51.7%. Player 5 and Player 6 both win 25%, so Games % decides again — 45.5% edges 41.7%. Notice Player 3 sits last: he banked the same 30 games won as Player 4 and a higher Games % (46.9%) than Players 5 & 6 — yet his Win % (20%) is the lowest, and winning matches comes first. That's the whole point of the Games-won column being informational: it feeds Games %, but Win % is what sets the rank. Player 4 (walkover no-show) still carries that loss; Players 5 & 6 each show 4 scheduled from the voided match.

Some positions are shared by two players who split one slot due to unavoidable availability issues (for 2026, one position in Women's Doubles is shared this way). A shared slot is only a scheduling device — it never earns points itself. Exactly one of the two — call them Player X and Player Y — plays each match, plays it in full, and only that player is credited with the win and the games.

• Separate individuals. Player X and Player Y each keep their own standings line, built only from the matches they personally played. They never combine into one line, and never meet each other through the slot.
• Whoever plays is named. On the Match results tab the actual player is shown and credited; the shared label only appears until a match is played.
• Fewer matches is never a penalty. A shared player logs fewer matches by design, so we rank on Win % — matches won per scheduled match, not raw totals; a smaller fixed schedule can't drag you down, and can't be used to game the system either. Games % breaks ties.
• How the schedule count is set. The slot's matches split evenly between the two sharers, so each starts from a fair share (the slot's six matches ÷ two = 3 in 2026); the Win % denominator is the greater of that share and the matches they actually play — playing more raises it to track real matches, while playing fewer never drops it below the fair share, so one strong night can't inflate the rate.

Reading it: Player X (shared, 6 scheduled) ranks above full-slate Player Z because she wins a bigger share of her matches — 83% to 60% (and takes a bigger share of games, 61.5% to 55.2%), even with four fewer matches — the smaller fixed schedule neither helps nor hurts. Player Y is tagged provisional until they reach the minimum matches needed for a play-off seed.

Rules crosswalk — how PTC compares to USTA & the pro tours

These footnotes benchmark the four situations above against established tennis rules. PTC follows the same principles and, where noted, adds a stricter fairness guard suited to an informal, individually-ranked league.

1. Walkover = a win with no score played. Across sanctioned tennis a walkover credits the player who appeared with a win, and no games or score are entered — it is not a played result. USTA — entering a walkover; UTR — effect of walkovers.
2. Unplayed / abandoned matches are disregarded. Rating systems do not count walkovers, defaults, double-walkovers or abandoned matches — the same logic behind PTC voiding a no-fault cancellation for both players. UTR — non-completed matches.
3. An alternate is scored on their own account. At the Nitto ATP Finals an alternate who replaces a withdrawn player “does not inherit the results of the player he is replacing” — exactly PTC's “only who plays is credited.” ATP Finals — alternates; Nitto ATP Finals — rules & format.
4. Split positions keep separate records. Tournament alternates and team-competition rosters each own their own match record rather than combining into one line — the model PTC uses for a shared slot. ATP Finals — alternates.
5. Round-robin tiebreak order. Groups are ranked by matches won, then head-to-head, then percentage of sets and games won (ATP additionally weighs matches played, so a 1–2 outranks 1–1) — the toolkit behind PTC's Win % / Games % / head-to-head steps. LTA — round-robin standings; Nitto ATP Finals — format.
6. Substitutes by sanction; the player on court is credited. USTA prohibits substitutions once line-ups are exchanged except in defined cases (e.g. warm-up injury); the player who actually plays owns the result. USTA — league substitutions.
7. Double walkover / double default. When neither side appears there is no one to award the win to — the match is a double walkover: neither side is credited a win and neither advances, and rating systems disregard it entirely. A standings-based league instead charges both sides the loss so a mutual no-show earns nothing. UTR — walkovers & double walkovers; walkover explainer.

Every match carries a short ID on the Results tab so anyone can point to it: M1men's, W1women's, X1mixed — numbered in date and time order within each discipline (on the current schedule, men's run M1–M39, women's W1–W14, mixed X1–X18).