October 2022 Updates

There are some major enhancements to vsBadminton in the new update on October 8th. We will also look at some of the other recent improvements.

Training Partners

This is a new experimental feature. Normally, vsBadminton attempts to give players a variety of partners and opponents. But what if you are running a league club and want competition partners to train together?

There is a new option “Enable Training Partners” on the Settings screen. If this is turned on, then the player screen gets a new entry, “Training Partner”. Initially this is set to “none” for each player, but if you click the change button, you can select any other player as being that player’s partner.

While Training Partners is enabled, any player with a nominated partner who is available will (nearly) always be picked with that partner. Players without nominated partners will be picked with different partners as normal, and so will a player whose nominated partner is not present or is already playing.

While Training Partners is enabled, you can see an asterisk * against each player who has a nominated partner.

If you disable Training Partners, the nominated partners will be remembered, but will not be visible or have any effect until you enable the option again on the settings screen. You can enable and disable the option at any time; perhaps you want to play the first half of each session with variety (Training Partners disabled), then enable Training Partners for the second half.

When picked, Training Partners might play against other nominated Partnerships, or might play different opponents picked in the normal way. You can have some of your players with partners and some without. vsBadminton will still try to provide varied opponents, while balancing that aim with trying to provide even games.

Re-picking Games

vsBadminton is designed to help you run sessions, not to take over from you. You can always change any game that it picks, in a number of different ways:

Switch Player

On the game screen, if you touch any of the player names, you can replace them with any other player that is free.

Rotate Players

The rotate button keeps the same four players, but changes the partnerships. As there are only three ways to have four players play, you can press the button until you get the partnerships you want

Remove Player

This is new from the September update: on the game screen, when you click on a player, as well as a list of other players that you can replace them with, there is a button “Pick without this player” that will replace the game with a completely new pick, excluding the selected player. That means some or all of the other three players might change also.

Delete Game

You can always just delete the game and pick again, though if nothing else has changed it will just pick the same game again. It used to be that the game numbering would reflect the deleted game, but that has not been the case for a while.

Re-pick Game

The game screen also has a redo button that will change to the next best game to pick, according to vsBadminton’s criteria. It goes through the five best picks (assuming that that many different picks are possible), then cycles back to the original pick.

This feature has always been present, but it used to appear only on the most recently picked game. Now it can be used on any game that is not finished.

Which to use?

• If you just think that vsBadminton has made a bad choice, use the redo button
• If you can’t play the chosen game because one player has left, touch that player’s name and use the “Pick without this player” option
• If you want a specific game, switch out the players you don’t want for the ones you do want, one by one.
• If you have picked several games and want to change one of them, you will get better results if you delete all the new games, make the changes, and then pick them all again
• Ultimately it’s your choice: vsBadminton is a helper, not a boss.

Results Table

A recent addition is the results table screen, which can be accessed from the club screen in the management app (accessed with the icon). The results table screen gives a list of all games for the session, and a list of players with their wins and losses. It is designed to be printed or viewed on a monitor, as opposed to most of vsBadminton which is optimised for phones.

In the October update, you can now share the results screen; if you press press the “share” button, you will get the same page, but with a link that can be viewed by anyone without logging in to the vsBadminton website.

Ignore men/women

This is another recent addition, from July: vsBadminton when selecting players to play a game will try hard to pick “proper” doubles games – level doubles or mixed doubles.

Sometimes this isn’t ideal; for example in a group of men with one woman, the woman will get to play fewer games because the evaluator will prefer to pick a mens’ doubles game than a MM v MF game.

If you want the evaluator to ignore whether players are male or female, you can check the “Ignore men/women” button on the Settings screen. It can be changed at any time and will take effect immediately.

Play quick games

Standard badminton games are played to 21 points, requiring a 2-point winning margin, and a limit of 30 points.

Some groups prefer to play shorter games - the “Play quick games” checkbox will change the game results screen to allow games played to 15 points, with a maximum of 17.

This setting can be changed at any time; it won’t affect games that have already completed, so you can switch from normal mode to quick game mode and back during a session.

(The “21” button on the game screen for will still read “21”)

Minor changes

Some small changes recently - the performance is much improved in the October release: this is noticeable when there are a large number of free players to pick from (meaning there are very much more possible games for vsBadminton to consider).

The layout has been modified to make better use of wider phone/tablet screens.

On the game list, games that are not finished are spaced out more, to make them easier to select so that scores can be entered quickly.

There is a little more information on the “Player Stats” screen – reached from the icon on the player screen. You can now see a list of any one player’s previous partners and opponents in the session, and a view of that one player’s results so far.