New players often run into the problem of not qualifying for the draws of events. The best way to get into a tournament is to look on the schedule page and see what tournaments still have slots remaining. The figure below shows the Schedule screen. Look for the ones highlighted in blue because these have slots remaining. The number of slots is the total of the main draw slots plus the qualifying draw slots.

You should check this page daily if you are ranked low because sometimes the tournaments will fill-up.

Once your player starts winning some matches, getting into the tournaments shouldn’t be a problem.

Smash Court tennis 2 is easily one of the best tennis games going around. I have the playstation 2 version and the 1 only BIG downside to the game is, no Roger Federer, I dont know what the makers were thinking of to not put the worlds best tennis player on the game. Apart from that the game is very good and realistic. You can play matches from 1 set 3 games to 5 sets 6 games. The pro tour mode is the best ive played, you start out ranked 250 and have to work your way to the top, I’ve just reached number 1. When you create your tennis player for pro tour you can choose a different look, returning stance, right or left handed and your serve action. In pro tour when you add attributes for example to volley other attributes will decrease slighty so that you cannot make your player invinceble. This is the best tennis game and I advise you to get it if you like tennis.

The game is called Smallball Baseball (Smallball Soccer is also out, but save that for later on). Smallball baseball is an amazing mix of 2d graphics, and an awesome community. The basic concept is that you download a small 8mb client for your computer. On this client is everything you need to for Smallball…it’s FREE! The basic concept without going into too much detail is to train your 12 players (9 starters, 3 benchies) every 48 hours on a practice field in order to improve their skills. When you first get your team they will be barely able to throw or catch or hit, or even run as this will be quite evident as you watch your team struggle to do normal baseball functions on the field. Your team is completely customizable. You name the players, the team, and can pick the colors of their hats, and shirts/pants. It’s really quite amazing.

You have access to the Standard Trainer for free. It is just a basic baseball field. Training is noted by stars over a players head. So if he is batting, and has been for maybe 5 minutes and you see stars, that means he gained skill (You will also see a +1 or so on come up on the screen.

Training happens in real time so a regular session takes about 30 minutes. There has recently been a program called Timeshift added by a user for the communities use, and this basically allows a owner to speed up the training by tricking the system clock of his or her computer. It sounds illegal, but the Commissioner (creator of Smallball) has said he is okay with it.

You can initiate a game against any other Smallball team at any time of the day so if you just wanted to watch your boys go at it with another team, you can. Or if you wanted to see if you can beat the best team in Smallball, you can try anytime. You can try out for the Pro Leagues or join a tournament run by other owners with prizes that upgrade your team!

There are so many things that I can’t explain with great detail right now, but here are a few.

-You can buy a “Deluxe Trainer” for a one time payment of 20 dollars. It comes equipped with batting cages, and a pitching cage (You have to FIND your pitcher. He will be the guy who is the highest skilled pitcher after everyone on your team has tried to be one) and a fielding cage, also, a track to run on, and throwing and fielding area.

-There are many things available in the Smallball Mall. You can switch a right hander to a left hander for 5 dollars and even FIRE a bad player.

Smallball uses a concept called “tickets.” They really are just codes that you enter into a special area that is available on your Smallball Client.

I haven’t even been able to dabble the water with this game so PLEASE do check out www.smallball.com for an amazing game. Trust me, to be good, you really just need to be smart, but the only downside is that a lot of people BUY their way to victory through the use of lefties and STADIUMS. Yes I said stadiums. Smallball offers over 12 stadiums some rarer than others that are available in the Smallball Mall.

System requirements are low, so everyone can enjoy Smallball.

See you on the field.

(Check out www.smallball.com for rules about their Pro League, and all the Tournaments. Also go to www.smallball.org the forums for the game)

One of the most memorable tennis games of all time is undoubtedly Virtua Tennis. With simple button mashing mechanics, players could perform on the court with exceptional grace and success.

Virtua Tennis World Tour is one such game. Developed by Sumo Digital and SEGA, World Tour stands as one of the best reasons to own a PSP. Or should you have one already, it’s one of the best games you can get. World Tour offers the same kind of fast, fun, engrossing game play of the arcade and Dreamcast classics. And because it’s portable, it feels that much cooler. Fans of the series will find little to complain about here and will most assuredly praise World Tour as the best tennis game, since, well, Virtua Tennis 2.

World Tour isn’t just a game for fans, either. Neither is it a niche title requiring a specific measure of commitment to enjoy. More than anything, it’s the accessibility that defines Virtua Tennis best. Anyone can pick it up and have fun. Fans of the series know this, but those new to the series will discover what they’ve been missing out on.

Note: This post was submitted by a tennis manager in Playasport. Read it as an Opinion/Editorial as it may/may not contain accurate advice! Thanks to RicoDDR for the post!

So, you’ve made your tennis player. You’re ranked waaaaaaay low. You want to get to the top? How do you do that? Read this guide to find out how.

The first thing you’re going to have to do is associate your points. This is where you decide what road you’re going to take. You’re either going to want to go down the road of Hardcourt, All-court, or Clay. Clay is not a good choice, as there aren’t enough Clay tournaments to get highly ranked. It’s pretty split down the middle between Hardcourt and All-court.

If you’re going to go Hardcourt, allocate a large amount of your points to hardcourt. Then you get to divide them through the non-court skills. Here’s how they’re ranked, 1 as best, 5 as worst:

1. Serve
2. Forehand and Backhand
3. Speed
4. Fitness
5. Volley

Now if you’re all-court, just distribute it between the non-court skills.

Now the scheduling of tournaments. It’s fairly simple. If you’re hardcourt, you’re going to want to schedule for everyday that has a level 5 hardcourt tournament that is highlighted blue. Now, you’re going to want to register for the tournaments with the LEAST amount of players, to increase your chances of getting far. You should do fairly well for the first quarter of the year. The end will not be as good, as the tournaments will have more people in it, as there are less hardcourt tournaments.

If you’re an all-court, you’re going to want to schedule your tournaments for these courts, 1 ranked as best, 4 as worst:

1. Grass
2. Carpet
3. Clay
4. Hardcourt

Why is this? Because not many people allocate points to grass and carpet, as opposed to clay and hardcourt.

Once again, stay at level 5s, and maybe 4s. Make sure they are highlighted blue.

Finally, there is the gaining points. The card system is all random, so I can’t help you with that. But, from what I can tell, if you beat someone in the main draw that is significantly higher ranked than you, you will get a skill point. Now, when you’re allocating points, you’re going to want to focus on one skill at a time. Scroll up a bit to see the skill ranking, and go by that. If you’re hardcourt, be sure to fill that out first.

Now with this guide, patience, devotion, and a little luck, you will be flying up the ranks in no time!

This is a very common question and I might have taken for granted that people understand how the site works all this time. So here’s how it all works for those of you who are interested.

As a user, you’ve probably already set up your teams and/or players. This tells the system you’re ready to go.

Every night, there is a special set of processes that runs automatically (and hopefully without error!). It loads in any pre-scheduled games or tournament draws. Then the program takes all the stats and settings for each team or player and does a match-up of the data.

I’m a lazy programmer so this is as automated as possible.

Each sport has a unique way to determine the winner. Usually I have run 100,000 - 1 million simulated rounds on the algorithm before the sport even shows up on the site. While I try to account for all different types of players, inevitably someone on the site gets creative and throws the whole thing off. (Check out the post about football, which I recently adjusted.)

So normally I tweak the programming a little bit, but never dramatically, as time goes on.

After the simulation runs, the results are stored and the site is updated automatically.

The nightly processes take anywhere from 30 minutes - 2 hours to run. Since I recently tweaked the server, I am hopeful the processes run faster and without intervention than they have in the past. Sometimes they get stuck and I end up having to re-vamp everything. If it’s too crazy, I just cancel the results. Fortunately this hasn’t happened more than 5-6 times in 6 years.

So this is what happens every night. Hopefully the insight helps everyone understand why there’s no human intervention required to “play a game.”

Thanks to a feedback message from acorpuz, the tennis aging process has been modified. Previously, players would age one year at the beginning of each season. However, managers who created a new player at the end of the previous season would then start with a player that was 19 years old instead of 18.

So now, then aging process occurs on the 28th day of the month, immediately following the retirement of old players. This should fix the problem.

Saw the ad for this system on the Playasport site one day and researched it a little. Unfortunately not enough. So I bought it. With golf and tennis, the $250 price tag seemed hefty, but it was Christmas time and I was spending money on everyone else, so I spent some on myself.

Was excited when the game came because you get a mini golf club and putter and two mini tennis rackets as well. But when the game screen loaded and the games looked like those Japanese charicatures of sports games, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.

I was expecting tennis to be a little more like the real thing, but as it turns out, you have little control over where the ball goes, and it’s more about swing timing and little else. After a while I realized you could just slap the racket on your knee and not only hit it back harder, but hit it more accurately. So don’t be fooled by the image shown along with this post, if you try to pretend you’re actually playing tennis, it won’t work.

Golf was a little better, but it was also really difficult getting accurate shots.

Overall, I’d wait until another generation of this system comes out, or a different one. Right now it’s like playing pong in the 70’s. If you really can’t wait, then you’re stuck with a primitive wanna be.

I get this question asked a lot. When I first built the site a long time ago, it seemed like an obvious choice to have teams carry over from season to season. But then I realized that this adds a huge amount of disparity when new teams come on board.

So after weighing the pros and cons, I decided that resetting the teams was a good decision. Not only would it allow for the “dead” teams to be automatically removed from the system, but new players would have just as much fun.

Additionally, this decision would also show who could make the best tactical decisions, especially at the beginning of the season, when the skill levels are all the same.

So don’t freak out when the teams get reset. Everyone starts in the same place.

I bought this game at the height of the college football season and was happy with what I got. The game has pretty much every facet of college football and you can choose to manage as much or as little about the team as you want.

The game does not use actual college team names, but they are close enough that you get it. You can rename teams as you wish, which is good if you want to make changes.

The simulation itself is a little on the slow side. It takes a couple minutes to sim a weekend of games. The offseason and recruiting is LONG if you don’t really care about that part of the game, but again it’s really only 10 minutes or so.

There are lots of rankings, stats, and awards which is cool. Just make sure you save your game!