Services
We can obtain a domain for you, basically any name you wish, as long as it is not taken yet. Ask us for details!
You do not need to have your own website, but if you have one, and you want to continue to use it, this is possible too. The Bethico League Software Suite provides mans to make announcements on the home page, run a forum, has a download section, and more. However, it is possible to integrate it to an existing website too. To do that, provide a subdomain name and point a link from your exiting website. You might want to chose a template theme which matches your existing website theme.
If you do not have a league website, you can have it setup on our servers. After requesting a "Free Domain" and "Hosting" services, you can operate your own league website powered by the Bethico League Software Suite. This is free of charge for you.
We finance our services with a fee per player per year, starting from the second year of operating with our league website. We do not engage in advertising, which means your league website is never cluttered with advertisement, nor are your members subject to personalized advertising or tracking, unlike other league software providers. We believe that collecting a small fee per player with a totally transparent cost / fee ratio and zero advertisement is a more appropriate way to increase the value of your league without hidden cost or privacy issues for your members.
The first year is completely free and includes setting up an optional subdomain to bethicoleague.com, setting up the league website, and support in setting up seasons, venues, teams, and players, so you can run your league with the support of the Bethico League Software Suite. You get all features, without any restrictions.
If you are happy with the website and our service you can then extend the service annually. From the second year the charge is as low as 2 USD (or an equivalent fee in your currency) per registered player per year, that's less than a beer! Player registration is always taken from the previous year, so it's very easy to calculate and administer.
If you have an existing website, you might replace the current site with the Bethico league site and keep the existing domain name. Or, you point to a subdomain from your existing website, if you want to keep it. If you don't have a website, or you want to change the domain name, then that's easy too. We can obtain a domain for you, basically any name you wish, as long as it is not taken yet. Ask us for details!
Your website is hosted on a dedicated physical server with minimum specification of 8 cores and 32GB of main memory.
We host your league's website on our own servers. This guarantees the necessary performance, security, and daily backups.
Leagues
Yes, you can enter tournaments as a separate event to team or singles leagues. Single and double elimination tournaments are supported with automatic seeding from 2nd round onwards.
Yes, you can handle handicaps with the site. First, you would chose a rating system which allows for easy handicap allocation. Then, each player can be assigned a handicap based on his or her playing skill at the start of each season. Handicaps also develop during the season based on wins and losses. You can even have a "dynamic" handicap, where player handicap changes over the season as the player moves up the ladder based on wins.
Our preset rating calculation parameters start every player at 5.0. Very good players can reach 9.0 or higher over time, where ratings are calculated after every game. In such a system handicaps acquired would be between 3 and 9. But bigger spreads are possible too, if you chose different rating parameters.
The website does not depend on any rules of play, as long as a winner is determined at the end of each game. You can make the rules of play available as a download or menu entry on the website, so every player can familiarize themselves with it.
No problem, the Bethico League Software Suite supports any kind of pool billiard, snooker, or dart league.
Many types of leagues can be setup, such as:
- Team leagues with or without divisions
- Team leagues with singles and doubles games
- Singles (individual) leagues
- Challenge leagues
The Bethico League Software Suite supports all billiard and dart games. You can use it for 8-ball, 9-ball, 10-ball, 14.1 straight pool, snooker, darts cricket, 501, 301, or any other game you prefer. You can register just games, or legs, or frames, played and won.
There is a number of leagues who utilize our website. You can find some of them through the main menu "Leagues".
Administration
League Operators can administer the site. When you decide to operate your league with our website, you or anyone appointed by you will be given operator permissions. These can be several people from your league. Other members of the league, even if they have a login to the site, will not be able to login to the administrator back-end, and therefore not be able to setup seasons, teams, or league settings. The players who get appointed as Captains of teams will be able to add players to their team and enter match results for their team matches.
You can divide your league into different divisions. Every division can have it's own settings, for example it is possible to play only 10 games in a weaker division, and 20 games in a stronger division. Within a division, all matches need to have the same match settings, and the same number of games.
Yes, this is possible. You can connect different leagues to share the same venues, the same players, and the same ratings. The latter means if a player plays in different leagues which are connected, then his or her rating will be modified after each game played in any of the leagues, and the ratings will always be kept consistent.
No, permissions on the website do not change after have been granted, even if the captain of the team changes. However, league Operators have the ability to remove permissions from any player.
Only Operators can setup seasons and new teams. The league data is always your league's property, Bethico will never share or give away your league's data. Nightly backups are taken for the sole purpose of safeguarding against loss of data or mistakes in data entry. Even if you decide to discontinue using our website, the data entered will remain your league's property.
It is easy to setup a league. There is an initial effort when doing this the first time, which includes setup of venues, teams, and players. You don't need to populate every team, but you need to enter and assign captain permissions to at least one player per team. Afterwards, this captain can populate his or her team.
As an Operator of the league you can modify any match result. Operators can assign Captain permissions to players, after which those players can modify match results of matches their team played. It is also possible to assign captain permissions to more than one player of the same team, e.g. to have Co-Captains. Co-Captains have the same permissions as Captains, besides entering match results they can add players to the team, or have access to special views which allow to manage unknown players, and more.
As a league Operator you have access to the website's administrator back-end. There you can setup a new season easily with a few clicks, copy settings from previous seasons or define new settings for a new season. You will define season dates, skip dates when the league does not play, teams participating in the season, special games, criteria for players to be allowed to play in tournaments or playoff matches, and more.
If a player was added to a team, and played at least one game, then this player will be automatically kept in the active team roster of that team when a new season is set up. Any player who did not play at least one game in a season will be removed from the active team roster in a following season. However, this player can easily be restored as active player with just one click by the Captain of the team, or an Operator. This allows to keep the team roster as small as possible, but still make it easy to manage players in the team.
Deleting a player is not encouraged, as it breaks the history of the match and season data. Operators can delete a player, after which all games of the deleted player will be replaced with "Unknown player". It is recommended to remove a player from the team roster, or to obfuscate the player's name if requested, rather than deleting the player from the database.
If you involve captains in entering team members and match results, then administering a league with our website is very easy and does not take much time. The operation of the website is such that the efforts can be shared among Operators and Captains. This not only helps in reducing work load for Operators, but it also adds to the identification of players and captains with the league. Match results can be entered as matches progress, so at the end of the match all results are already recorded. After team members have been entered, it is as easy as selecting the player from the team roster of each team, and assigning the winner for each game.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Bethico League Software Suite allows you to manage matches and games, players and their performance, game schedules, locations, and almost everything else which is of interest to your league members. It requires very minimal effort to setup and maintain a league.
The Bethico Software Suite can handle all kinds of leagues for Billiard and Darts competitions. It can be setup for team leagues, individual leagues and player challenge leagues. The number of players or teams is not limited and can be adjusted to your needs. There is a built-in forum section to communicate with your members.
The site for your league is hosted on our own servers. You can either utilize a free sub domain to access your league, or you can point your own domain to our servers.
Team and player performance is recorded. You can then measure performance between teams, players, and your own history.
The website is optimized for Computers, PCs, Tablets, and mobile phones.
Statistics
There is a all time best players view. It shows the top 100 rated players since the league adopted this website, but can also display less, more, or all the players registered.
Multi-frame games are calculated the same way as single frame games. However, there is a multiplier which reflects the frame difference. In our preset rating calculation formula a player gains 0.1 rating points when beating a player rated the same, up to a maximum of 0.2 rating points when a very low rated player beats the highest rated player. In multi-frame games, these rating gains will be the same if the player wins by 1 frame difference, and will be doubled if the player wins to zero. Everything in between will be calculated as a fraction of it. Example: 7-0 = 2x rating gain, 7-6 = 1x rating gain, 7-3 = 1.5x rating gain, 5-5 = 0 rating gain. Note the remark on 5-5: it is possible to have a game end in a "draw", which would be the case if you use handicapping. If a player with hc5 beats a player with hc7 at 5:5. There will be no rating gain or loss, because ratings are calculated on performance only. Handicap is simply a means to increase the likelihood of a weaker player to beat a stronger player.
We are using a formula to calculate player ratings. While the parameters may be different for every league, the base formula is the same. As a visitor to a league website you can go to match view, view ratings, and then select the Help button to view the match details, which explains the rating formula.
Ratings are calculated for every game and are reciprocal. This means that the rating earned by the winning player is the same as the rating lost by the losing player.
It is possible to use a different rating formula, for example if you used to calculate ratings in your league before. In this case you will need to provide us with the rating formula, and we will override the built in function for your league. The rating formula must be calculated by the server, it cannot contain "human" addition such as manual adjustment of start rating before every match. The formula must be reziprocal, and it must be possible to evaluate the rating with reasonable computing power to not slow down the site performance.
Special games such as table runs or marks thrown are not reflected in the player's ratings. Player's ratings are calculated from wins and losses only.
Several different views allow you to check your own progress. The player overview shows start of season, current, and best rating, winning streaks, total number of games, and special games achieved. The team overview shows the ranking of players within the team. The player game history shows all games in chronological order, and there is a charting function, which displays your rating chart over time. Of course, you can also pull one of the many statistics views to see where you fit in.
There is a view on the website which shows all player's ranking. You can select the date when the ranking is taken, view female or male players only, sort and filter it after different criteria. All ranking information is generated automatically from the match entry information, and generated on demand, which means changes in matches show in all statistics views without delay.
Yes, you can view the team ranking with several different criteria such as average rating of team players, highest ranked player, and more.
If the 2 leagues are connected you don't need to transfer any ratings. All ratings would always reflect the latest games played in any of the 2 leagues.
It is currently not possible to have league schedules with more than 1 match per week.
There is a work-around. You would need to run 2 leagues, for example a Wednesday league and a Friday league, and connect the 2 leagues. Ratings will be calculated across the leagues. You would need to create 2 seasons, and reflect teams and team players in both leagues. Also, this would be 2 leagues and would be treated as 2 leagues, even though in your organisation it would be only one.
Special games such as table runs in billiard or 180 out in darts can be viewed in the special games views, or on the player overview page.
Technical
The site can only be hosted on Bethico's servers. This way we can guarantee functionality and server performance to always have a great website experience. Please also note that the source code of the Bethico League Software Suite is not open source.
There are several color themes available for the front end template. The template is highly customized for use with the Bethico League Software Suite, but it is, in principle, possible to use another template. You would need to develop another template by yourself, and let me tell you, the efforts should be quite significant. I would rather suggest that you let us know what you are missing in the Bethico template, and we would try to accommodate your wishes. If you really wish to develop your own template we would share with you the back-bone of the Bethico template, so you have a good guidance in what is required. Condition for using your template is that you share all sources with us and grant us publishing rights.
You can utilize the built-in Kunena Forum, a state of the art forum software available for Joomla. Also, you can offer downloads and links to social media to your members.
There are several color themes available for the Bethico template. If you don't like any of those, you can opt to develop your own color theme. This is much easier to do than developing your own template. We would share with you an existing color theme, which you then can adapt to your own liking. Only condition is that you transfer publishing rights for the theme back to Bethico.
If you wish to continue using your existing league website, you can use a link on your website to point to ours through a subdomain.
If you wish to integrate the history of your existing league website, but start using the Bethico League Software Suite exclusively, that also possible. There is a php script file which needs to be adapted to Bethico so old history can be displayed on the site. This file can either be written by yourself, or we can take care of it for a small fee. Contact us to check the details!
There are several languages available for the front-end, and English and German for the administrator back-end. If you need another language available for the front-end, that's possible too. We would share with you the English language strings, which you can translate into your desired language. Any left to right language is supported, but right to left is not. Only condition is that you transfer publishing rights for the translation back to Bethico.
Yes, you can access the site only through SSL/TLS, which means all communication between your browser and our servers is encrypted. We will handle the certificate renewals, which is free of charge for you.
We are using the latest Joomla CMS framework. This way we benefit from a huge community of users, security vulnerabilities are detected and fixed very quickly, and we also benefit from the availability of excellent extensions to the site, for example Akeeba Backup and Kunena Forum, or download and login user management.
Currently, English, German, French, Thai, and Korean are supported for the front-end, and English and German for the administrator back-end.