Running a table tennis club night

The complaint about club nights is always the same and it is always about waiting. The fix is arithmetic done before anyone arrives.

One table-slot is one table for the length of one game. A single game to 11 runs six to ten minutes including the knock-up, so call it eight.

Tables	Hours	Table-slots	Games each, 12 players
2	2	30	5
3	2	45	7
4	2	60	10
3	3	68	11

Each game uses two players, so the number of games one person gets is roughly table-slots × 2 ÷ players. Twelve people on three tables for two hours get about seven games each. Twenty people on the same three tables get four. That number, not the format, is what people judge the night by.

It is worth saying explicitly because people apologise for it: ITTF 2.12.1 permits a match of the best of any odd number of games, and one is an odd number. A single game to 11 is a sanctioned match format, not a compromise.

That matters for a club night because the unit determines everything downstream. A best-of-five club night on three tables gives twelve people two matches each and a lot of standing about. The same night at one game to 11 gives them seven.

If a single game feels too short for the last round, lengthen only that round. Nothing requires the format to be uniform, and a best-of-three final at the end of a one-game night reads as an occasion rather than an inconsistency.

Box league. Split the room into boxes of four or five by standard. Everyone plays everyone in their box; the top one or two go up next week, the bottom one or two go down. Stable, self-correcting, and the standard sorting happens on its own over a few weeks.

Box size	Games per box	Time on one table
4	6	~50 min
5	10	~80 min
6	15	~2 h

Boxes of four are the sweet spot for a two-hour night with one table each: six games, done inside an hour, and time for a knockout afterwards.

Ladder. A single ordered list. You challenge someone one or two places above you; win and you swap. Good when attendance is irregular, because no fixture depends on who turned up.

Swiss-style pairing. Everyone plays the same number of rounds, each time against someone on a similar record. Nobody is eliminated, and by round four the pairings are close. Best when the room is large and the standards are unknown.

Americano and mexicano. Doubles rotation, where partners change every round and you score points rather than matches. Americano fixes the rotation in advance; mexicano pairs each round by the current standings, so the leaders keep meeting each other. Both need doubles mode in JudgeMate — switch the entry mode to doubles and the six formats appear, including these two. They are the right answer when the point of the evening is playing with everyone rather than finding a winner.

The hardest club night is the one where a league player and a beginner are in the same room. Three approaches that work, in order of how much administration they cost:

Boxes by standard. The cheapest fix. Standards separate themselves after two or three weeks of promotion and relegation, and nobody has to be told they are in the beginners' box — they simply are.

Handicaps. Start the weaker player at 3, 4 or 5. A game to 11 with a five-point start is genuinely competitive across a wide gap, and the handicap is easy to adjust week to week. It is not an ITTF format, so keep it for the social night rather than the club championship.

Doubles. Pair strong with weak. A doubles game equalises far more than a handicap does, because the alternating-strokes rule means the weaker player touches the ball just as often and cannot be hidden — which is also why it improves them faster than a singles thrashing.

Create the event, pick table tennis, and set the draw up for the shape you chose:

• Box league — a round-robin draw per box, or one round robin if the room is small enough.
• Ladder or Swiss — a round robin with the number of rounds you want, and let the table sort itself.
• Americano or mexicano — switch the entry mode to doubles first, or the format will not appear.

Set points per game to 11 and games to win to 1 for a single-game night. Add your tables as resources so the schedule lays the rounds out across them rather than into one queue.

Each match carries its own referee link. On a club night the players usually keep their own score, so the useful surface is the public results page: it updates as matches are confirmed, and it saves you from being asked who is next eleven times an evening.