General question directed toward everyone and anyone:

How does your club run doubles? What are the levels of your regular local players.

In my club, we have about 4 genuine "A" players (950+), about 10 AMs (880-920) and some women and rec players (<850). What ends up happening with our weekly doubles is that a lot of the Ams have to play "A" and they never cash (go to doubles 2-3 times a week and never be in the money).

So we were thinking about doing an ABC partnering where the As and the Cs are together and all of the B's are together.

What do you think of that? Is this overthinking the process?

go for it! i think that would be a great idea.

I try to handicap doubles when i host by having the top bracket partner up with the lower bracket.

That is a tough problem. The issue often is that the top A players score on their own high enough to beat a B-B team. We discussed this quite a bit last year and I came up with a random number generated thing that reduced this effect, but you can not eliminate it.

You may want to consider doing 2 divisions: a Pro-Am and an Am-Am. Make divisions after you do the random draw. That way the Am-Am teams have a shot at winning something. Payouts will of course be less for the top players, so it may not go over well with them if they are coming to doubles just for the easy money. But....doubles is supposed to be fun, or so I've heard. :)

We pretty much do the same in Raleigh

Pro Adv Am and Women

1. Women pick thier partner
2. Pros with ams until pros are done
3. Adv with ams until adv are done.
4. Ams with ams (just competing with themselves) for the rest.

MTL -

how many people do you have at doubles? sounds like a lot!

I've seen over 100 some nights. I'd say on average is around 30 - 60

General question directed toward everyone and anyone:

How does your club run doubles? What are the levels of your regular local players.

In my club, we have about 4 genuine "A" players (950+), about 10 AMs (880-920) and some women and rec players (<850). What ends up happening with our weekly doubles is that a lot of the Ams have to play "A" and they never cash (go to doubles 2-3 times a week and never be in the money).

So we were thinking about doing an ABC partnering where the As and the Cs are together and all of the B's are together.

What do you think of that? Is this overthinking the process?


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... you're "on the right track" with that thinking ... attempting to level-the-playing-field for as close to parity as you can ...
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... years ago , I ran several 3-man-team random-draw events ... on tough courses ... but the jist of it was : I advertised them as what I called : Gasoline Specials ... each player entering was ranked into one of three columns on my sign-up-sheets ... Premium , Mid-Grade , or Unleaded ... the "draw-of-the-cards" for each 3-person team had one from each gasoline-grade ...
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... well , you see what I mean ... resulting competitions seemed to always be close between all teams ... parity (or close to it) ...

I've ranked people by player rating and then split the field in 1/2. In practice, this worked as well as completely random draw (besides the experience of every beginner getting to play with an advanced or pro player).

Completely random gives those beginners / AMs a shot at winning (if they get paired with a top pro) and it gives the better players a good shot of winning if they get paired with another good player. This arrangement keeps both groups coming back for doubles.

Example: We've run doubles before our NT for the past few years. One year a beginner got paired with Barry Shultz and took home 1st place. The next year there were some 1000+ rated players participating but 2 Adv Ams took home 1st place.