Team Builder FAQ

What the Team Builder Does

The Team Builder helps you assemble the strongest squad your budget can afford for the tournaments running this week. You set a budget in credits, and it finds the eight players (six Starters and two Alternates) that give you the highest combined rating without going over. You can let it suggest a full team in one click, or build and tweak a team by hand. No account or login is needed, and nothing you do here is submitted to the official game: it is a planning tool.

Do I Need An Account?

No. The Team Builder runs entirely in your browser. There is no sign-up, and your team is not saved anywhere. Refreshing the page starts you fresh (see "Why Does My Team Reset?" below).

Who Is In The Player List?

The list holds the players entered in this week's tournaments, each with their price, rating and draw position. The two cards at the top of the page show which tournaments the roster covers ("Roster For") and how current the data is ("Data As Of"). Players who are not playing this week are hidden by default, but you can reveal them (see "Players Who Are Not Playing").

Building A Team

How Do I Set My Budget?

Type your budget into the Budget (Credits) box, or use the up and down steppers to nudge it. The Reset button next to the label returns it to the default. Every suggestion and the My Team total are measured against this number, and the budget bar in My Team turns orange if you go over.

How Does Suggest Team Work?

Press Suggest Team and the builder searches for the best-rated team your budget can buy. It is an exact optimisation, not a random pick: of every legal combination of players that fits your budget and your constraints, it returns the one with the highest combined rating. The result appears in the Suggested Team card, sorted by price, with the team's total cost and combined rating at the bottom. Press Use This Team to drop that team straight into My Team, where you can keep editing it.

If no valid team can be built (for example, your budget is too low, or your Must Have players cannot fit together) the card explains why instead of showing a team.

What Does Rank By Change?

Rank By chooses which rating the builder uses to value players and to rank the suggested team:

Mode	What It Uses
General ELO	Overall rating across all surfaces
Surface ELO	Rating on this week's surface (grass, clay or hard)
ATP Ranking	Official ATP ranking, best rank first

Surface ELO is usually the sharpest choice during a swing, because it rewards players who are strong on the surface actually being played this week.

Starters And Alternates

A full squad is eight players: six Starters and two Alternates. By default the builder optimises for your six Starters, since those are the players who score. The two Alternates are your bench. See the Alternates Chip below for when the bench starts counting too.

Fine-Tuning Your Team

Alternates Chip

Turn on the Alternates Chip to tell the builder that your bench will score this week (this mirrors the Alternates chip in the official game). With it on, the suggestion optimises all eight players rather than just the six Starters, so it spends your budget across the whole squad.

Different Quarters

Players in the same quarter of a draw meet each other earlier in the tournament, so stacking your team into one quarter means several of your players can knock each other out. Turn on Different Quarters and the builder spreads your picks across the draw, aiming for roughly one player per quarter so more of them can run deep at the same time.

Must Have And Must Not Have

Each player in the list has two small toggles: a check mark (Must Have) and a cross (Must Not Have). Must Have locks a player into every suggestion. Must Not Have bans a player from suggestions and removes them from your team. A player can be one or the other, not both. The builder then finds the best team that respects your locks and bans.

Players Who Are Not Playing

Sometimes you want to hold a player who is not in action this week (for instance, to keep them for an upcoming week). Turn on Show Non Active to reveal those players. Their cards are greyed and marked Not Playing. If you add or Must Have one of them, the builder treats them as a hold and places them in an Alternate slot, since a player who is not playing cannot score this week. Hold up to two of them and they fill the bench; the rest of your team is still optimised around them.

Building Or Editing By Hand

You do not have to use Suggest Team at all. In the player list, press the plus button to add a player to My Team, and Remove on a card to take them out. You can mix the two approaches: suggest a team, use it, then swap individual players by hand. My Team always shows your running cost, your combined rating and how much budget you have left.

Reading The Cards

What Is An ELO Rating?

ELO is a rating system that boils a player's strength down to a single number: the higher the number, the stronger the player. It began in chess (it is named after the physicist Arpad Elo) and is now widely used in tennis. Players gain points when they win and lose points when they lose, and the size of the swing depends on who they played: beating a higher-rated opponent earns more than beating a lower-rated one. Because the ratings are built from results, the gap between two players' numbers is a direct estimate of who is likely to win. Surface ELO applies the same idea but counts only matches on a given surface, so it captures who is genuinely strong on grass, clay or hard courts rather than overall.

The ratings used here come from Tennis Abstract, which publishes ATP ELO ratings (overall and per surface) and refreshes them weekly.

What Do The Rating Labels Mean?

Ratings come from Tennis Abstract ELO, and the short label tells you which surface it is for:

Label	Meaning
ELO	General ELO (all surfaces)
gELO	Grass ELO
cELO	Clay ELO
hELO	Hard-court ELO

The number in brackets next to a rating, such as (#12), is that player's rank on that rating.

Tournament And Quarter Pills

Each player card carries small pills: the tournament they are entered in, and their draw quarter (Q1 to Q4). The quarter pills use the same four colours as the Tournament Draws page, so you can see at a glance how your team is spread across the draw.

Data And Other Notes

Where Does The Data Come From?

Player ratings are Tennis Abstract ELO, which updates weekly, and ranks come from the official ATP rankings. The "Data As Of" card shows the date of the ratings and rankings currently loaded, so you always know how fresh the numbers are.

Why Does My Team Reset When I Refresh?

The Team Builder does not save anything between visits, on purpose: each session starts from a clean slate so you can experiment freely without old picks carrying over. If you want to keep a team, take a screenshot before you leave.

Why Does It Say Beta?

The Team Builder is new and still being refined. The way teams are valued and suggested may change as we tune it. If something looks off, it is worth checking back after the next weekly data update.