We built the score, then refused to show it

Deuce keeps a record of whether you turn up when you said you would. It has done since the first week. What it does not do, and will not, is show you that record as a number.

We built the score. Then we decided not to put it on screen. That decision is worth explaining, because it looks like we removed a feature and what we actually removed was a grade.

What it measures

After a session, the people who were there confirm it happened and who showed. That is the whole input. Turning up when you said you would moves your record up. Saying you are in and not appearing moves it down.

It does not measure how much you play. Somebody who drills twice a month and turns up both times is more dependable than somebody who commits to five sessions a week and makes three. Volume is not the virtue. Keeping your word is.

It also does not count sessions you logged on your own. Only sessions with at least two people feed it, because a solo entry has nobody to confirm it, and a record you can inflate by yourself is not worth showing anyone.

New players start in the middle. Not at zero, not at perfect. The reason is arithmetic: if your first session goes well and you are one for one, a raw average calls you a hundred percent dependable, and if you miss it, zero. Neither is true, because one session is not evidence. Starting in the middle means the record only becomes confident once there is something to be confident about, and nobody arrives carrying a bad month they have not had yet.

Then we looked at it as a number, and it was wrong

All of that machinery produces a value between zero and one. The obvious thing to do is round it and put it next to somebody's name.

We did that. Here is what it looked like: you open a partner's profile to see whether Thursday might work, and before you have read their name, before their level, before the shot they want to drill, you have read 0.72.

Three things go wrong at once.

A number invites ranking. Two decimal places imply a precision that is not there. The difference between 0.87 and 0.91 is one cancelled session eight weeks ago. That is noise, but it does not look like noise. It looks like an ordering, and people sort by it.

A number looks permanent. Somebody who had one bad month while their kid was ill carries a visibly worse figure than somebody who has played four times. The record is honest and the presentation is not, because a figure reads as a settled fact about a person rather than a description of a stretch of weeks.

People optimise the number instead of the behaviour. The moment it is a score, the rational move is to stop committing to anything you might miss. That is the opposite of the product. We want you to put a Thursday up and mean it, not to protect an average by never saying yes to anything.

Put together: a number attached to a human being is a grade. Nobody asked to be graded by an app for going to play pickleball.

So it is words

Deuce says shows up 9 in 10. That is the whole presentation. No decimals, no ranking, no badge, no colour that turns red.

Words do something a figure cannot: they stay a description. "Shows up 9 in 10" is a sentence about what has happened, and it reads as one. It is coarse on purpose, because the difference between 0.87 and 0.91 was never real enough to show anybody.

You still get the thing you actually needed. Before you commit to a standing Thursday with somebody you have played with twice, you want to know whether they turn up. Now you know. What you cannot do is line up nine people and sort them.

What it still is not

It is not skill, and it is not a DUPR substitute. There are people who show up 10 in 10 who would beat me left handed, and people I would never get a court with again who are excellent players. The two facts are unrelated, and Deuce keeps them unrelated.

It is also not a judgement. Somebody who shows up 6 in 10 is not a bad person. They are a person whose Thursdays are unreliable, which is a useful thing to know and not a verdict on them. The wording is deliberate: it describes the sessions, not the human.

Why show anything at all

Because everybody already tracks this, informally and badly.

You know who in your group is a maybe. You have known for months. That knowledge currently lives as gossip, it is unfair to somebody who had one rough stretch, and it is invisible to a new player, who has no way of finding the dependable partners and usually gives up before they do. Writing it down plainly is better than all of that.

The one thing here that has to be earned

You cannot buy it, you cannot import it from another app, and there is no upgrade that improves it. It moves when you show up and it moves back when you do not.

That was always the design. Refusing to render it as a score is the same idea carried one step further: the record exists so two people can commit to a Thursday, not so the people who play can be ranked.

If you think we have got this wrong, or you want the arithmetic in more detail, the support page has the short version and hello@joindeuce.com reaches a person.