Fun indoor handicap tournament on Sat 5 Jan

​Hello everyone,
 
Shingo is organising a handicap doubles tournament on Saturday 5 January in the main hall from midday to 3pm.
 
It should be a lot of fun and an opportunity for a get-together – a good way to start the year and get back into tennis, whether you haven’t played for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, and whether or not you are a member. We hope people who attend different sessions at Blackbrook will play.
 
There will be a £5 entry fee to cover the price of balls, tea, coffee, nibbles and perhaps some small prizes. You can enter as an individual, but if you’d like to enter as a pair, that should work as well.
 
The handicap scoring system is designed to even out differences in standard and produce close results. Are you paying attention? Here goes:
 

• If the score reaches deuce, only one more point is played. The receivers choose which side the deciding point is played from.
• If one team goes two games ahead, they start the next game 0-15 down.
• If they win that game and go three clear, they start the next game 0-30 down.
• If they lose that game, the handicap goes back to 0-15 for the next game.
• If they win that game and go four games clear, they start the next game minus 15-30 down.
• If they keep winning, the handicap remains at minus 15-30 down.
• If they lose, the handicap goes back down to 0-30.
• If they lose the next game, it goes down to 0-15, and so on...
• There are no sets. It‘s all done on games.
• The server stands on the correct side according to the score or it gets really confusing!!

 
It’s likely we’ll use a hit-and-mix (American-style) format, but we’ll decide on that when we have all the entries in. In this system there’s a top court (Court 1) and a bottom court (Court 4). When you win, you move up a court, and when you lose, you go down. You play against the person you’ve just played with.
 
Please enter by sending an email to [email protected] by Friday 28 December, preferably sooner to give us an idea of the kind of numbers we can expect. If this is a success, we’ll look into organising more such tournaments.
 
All the best and have a good Christmas,
 
Mike