It won’t pick a game - nothing happens

To pick a game it needs four players who are present:

If the players who should be available are showing or , click the button until they go back to playing.

They also need to be not already in a game. If you have picked a game, you need to either change it, delete it, or finish it and enter the score

It’s picking weird games

It prefers to pick level doubles or mixed doubles, but it will pick an unorthodox game (e.g. a man and woman against two men) if it has no alternative, or if it thinks the alternatives are worse.

Make sure it knows which players are male and female .

Note that there is an option in the config screen to ignore male and female. If the icons are showing grey, then that option is set.

Waiting times can confuse it. If you have a long break in your session, it thinks that the players who are present during the break are sitting waiting for a game, and it will favour picking them over players who were not present at that time. If your sessions have a long interval (for a coaching session, say, or a fire alarm), then you should mark all players as away until the session resumes.

The session isn’t counted as started until the first game starts, so you don’t need to worry about people being present before playing start, you can just mark them present as they show up.

Send an email if you think it is still making bad choices. Remember you can change any game it picks!

I created a session but can’t find it

A session is only valid for the day it is set for – you can’t access it after that date. However, the players and their ratings will carry over to the next session you create in the same series.

What do I need to play?

You need a smartphone or tablet or computer with an internet connection, and an up-to-date web browser. That’s all. If multiple users want to use it at once, you can do that, but only one person and device is needed.

The data usage is limited, so it will work over mobile internet, not just wifi, and should not be expensive even on a low data plan. But it does need reliable internet – nothing works while it is not connected.

Is it free?

It is completely free to use at present, and there are no plans to charge for it. There may be some advertising incorporated into the application in future.

What do you do with my information?

• vsBadminton will collect an email address from you if you choose to provide it, which you can use to recover an account or get notifications
• We will not use your email or other personal information for any other purpose
• We use cookies to identify you so that you can see the games that you need to see. We may also show advertising, and the advertisers will also use cookies to guide it
• If you enter personal information of your players, it is your responsibility as the controller of that data to meet data protection regulations. We will not pass the data to any parties other than those you specifically authorise through the site
• We use third-party facilities to store and process information. The information will be kept within the UK or EU
• Please contact us if you have any questions about privacy or data protection

Should I pick games in advance?

It only picks games using players who are currently free, so you can’t pick a “next game” for players who are still playing.

If you have four courts playing, and one finishes, you can either pick a game immediately, in which case the people who are still playing will not be picked for it, or wait for some or all of the other games to finish, so as to have more opportunity for mixing up the players. It is up to you.

If you accidentally pick a game early, so, for instance, it has to pick the same four players who just played because they are the only ones available, you can just delete that game and wait for more players to be available.

Can I get player rankings from vsBadminton?

The application is designed to be a helper for friendly sessions, not a tournament judge. Being competitive about rankings would require it to be much stricter about how sessions are carried on, or else it could be quite unfair. The user interface is deliberately vague and approximate about player strength, which it estimates only to help it avoid picking badly mismatched games.

However, there is a player list table that an admin can obtain after the session.

Can it handle singles games?

That is on our to-do list… if two players want to play singles, the only thing to do is to mark them as away for the duration of their game.

Can I use vsBadminton for other games than Badminton?

Badminton seems to have a particular need for it, because it is common to have 10-20 people playing a total of 50 or more doubles games in circumstances that make record keeping difficult. But the only things that really tie vsBadminton to Badminton are the graphics and the final score setup.