Enter the MatchMaker.

The MatchMaker is really two tools in one: a personal, visual reminder of your own schedule, plus a powerful comparison engine that provides instant information about your fellow players' availability. Let's start with with the first step, editing your Availability.

Notice all the colored bars on this player's calendar? That's his Availability. This player (we'll call him Trevor) has already input most of his schedule for the first half of the month, and by using the Availability panel as a guide, we can see that's he's free available to play on Saturday the 5th in the morning and later afternoon — but he has a match already scheduled for the early afternoon.The next date that he's available is Tuesday the 8th.

Trevor is just about to add some more information, so let's watch.

He clicks at the bottom of the calendar, where it says,“Click here to edit your availaibility”. This shows every timeslot in the month (note that it won't show timeslots that have already passed), and all Trevor needs to do is click on them to turn them on and off.

He wants to show that he's available anytime after 3 on Thursday the 3rd, so he simply clicks on the bottom two timeslots on that date to indicate that, and then clicks on “Submit your changes” at the bottom to save this to the database.

Here we see Trevor's newly updated schedule.

Now comes the fun part — the MatchMaker.

Trevor clicks on the MatchMaker button. Since he's playing both singles and doubles this season, he first has to choose which league he's wants to use the MatchMaker with.

Then he's show a list of all the other competitors in this league. He knows that he and his partner need to play the team of Plunkett/Oriestes soon, so he clicks on their names.

Notice the calendar has changed; everything that was there is gone, except for the MatchMaker data, displayed as color bars. See how some of the bars look a little dull, while others have ’MM’ inside?

Trevor moves his mouse overtop the blue bar (3 - 6 pm) on Thursday the 3rd, where the “MM” indicates that everyone is available to play. (In doubles, if only three players can make it during a particular timeslot, this is shown with a plain color bar, as you see here on Saturday evening.).

Now he clicks directly on this color bar and — voila — an email window opens up, ready with all the necessary information. All Trevor does is add a personal comment and hit Send — and suddenly, in the space of only about thirty seconds, he's done what would have taken perhaps 15 or 20 minutes (and often spread over days) to set up using traditional methods of calling or emailing everyone, processing everyone's replies, trying to negotiate a compromise and then contacting everyone again to see if it would work...

What's more, the MatchMaker can be accessed directly from the “My league” page. For every competitor in your Super-8 league that you still have to play, you'll see a small MM icon under their name. Just click on that, and the MatchMaker will compare your schedules immediately!