Team balance and why it is off by default
Skill-balanced sides are available per session, with a stated threshold — and a stated reason why the default rotation ignores ratings entirely.
By default, ratings are not consulted
With auto rotation running normally, skill ratings play no part in choosing who plays or who partners whom. The picker works purely from playing history — who has partnered whom, who has faced whom, who is owed court time, who has just played back to back.
This is a decision, not an omission, and it is worth stating plainly because most tools in this category do the opposite.
The rule
Skill balance is a per-session setting. When it is off, the rotation is rating-blind end to end: the same roster produces the same games whether or not anyone has a rating at all.
Why it is off by default
Balanced teams and partner variety pull against each other, and the tension is not marginal. Balancing by rating systematically pairs the strongest player with the weakest available one. Applied to every game, the consequence is that strong players never partner each other and weak players never partner each other — which removes a large share of the possible partner pairs from the evening entirely.
That directly undercuts what the rotation is for. A club night where everyone plays with everyone is the goal; permanently pairing by strength is a competitive-league behaviour that also makes the rating hierarchy visible and fixed on court every round. The person who is always the stronger half notices, and so does the person who is always the other half.
There is a data argument too. A rating is club-local, it is frozen at the value each player held when the session started, and a new member begins on a default figure rather than a measured one. Balancing hard on an estimate that has not settled entrenches whatever that estimate got wrong.
None of this is an argument that balanced games are bad — a club that wants closer games should turn it on, and plenty do. It is an argument about what should happen when nobody has expressed a preference.
What happens when it is turned on
Balance does not replace the variety ordering. It intervenes only when the split that variety wants would produce a lopsided game.
The rule
Take the four players the rotation has chosen and rank the three possible ways of splitting them into two pairs, by variety. If the top-ranked split has a team-average rating gap of 150 points or less per side, it is used unchanged and ratings are never consulted. If it is above that, the other splits with a gap of 150 or less are considered instead, still in variety order. Only if no split comes in under the threshold does the most even split win.
A gap of 150 points per side corresponds to roughly a 70/30 matchup. Below it the game is a contest; above it the result is largely decided before the first serve.
When balance does override the variety-preferred split, the lineup says so — the reason shown against that game names the rating balance rather than the variety reason it would otherwise have given.
Balance reorders the pairs within a foursome; it does not change which four players are on court. Who plays is decided by the rotation on coverage and court time before balance is consulted at all, so turning it on cannot cause the strong players to be grouped onto one court.
The comparison uses the rating each player held when they joined the session, not a live value that moves as the night goes on. A long session will drift from current ratings by design, so that games picked at 9pm are judged on the same basis as games picked at 7pm.