Never More Than Three

And a correction

The seat

Last week this desk credited Jonathan Yin with a 65-of-66 night and a climb to second. The scoreline was right and the name was wrong. Yin handed his seat over for the rest of the season before week 4, and it has been Ethan Lee on the court since — 65 of 66 on a 5-1 in his first week, which ties Shayne Wright's week 2 for the best single night anyone has posted this season, then 57 on a 4-2 against the top group on Wednesday. One hundred twenty-two points from a possible 132, in two weeks, from a man the league had never seen play. The seat was fourth after week 3. It is first now.

The rules are clear about the difference, and it matters here. A one-week sub plays on the absent player's behalf and the points land in that player's column. A rest-of-season replacement takes the seat outright — the registration, the group card, the standings row, the finish. Weeks 1 through 3 on this line are Yin's. Weeks 4 and 5 are Lee's. The lead is the two of them, added up.

And congratulations are the actual headline here. Blake Yinarrived September 9 — the night before Group 1 played the week that put his father's seat back on top of the table. Nobody in this league is going to argue Jonathan got the worse end of the week.

Group 1 · Wednesday night

Six games at the top

The two leaders were partners twice and opponents four times, and the night split almost perfectly down the middle. They opened together and won the week's first one-point game, 11–10 over Wright and McCann, then came back to the same pairing in game five and won it 11–7. Head to head they went 2-2 — Sparkman took 11–9 and 11–4, Lee answered 11–3 and 11–5 — but the points went 35–30 to Lee, and points are the whole ballgame here. Both men finished 4-2. Five points separated their nights, and three points separate their seasons.

Behind them, Shayne Wright and Jeremy McCann both went 2-4 and traded places anyway: McCann scored 51 to Wright's 48 and moved into third. Two weeks ago Wright was second. The top group has now been the same four men for three straight weeks, and it will be the same four again in week 6.

Performance of the week

Last place had the best night

Javier Figueroa went 5-1 on 63 of 66 — the best night in the league this week, out of twentieth place. Wins of 11–3, 11–8, 11–8, 11–5 and 11–6; the only blemish an 8–11 in the fifth game, partnered with Sunil Sunkara against Brady and Burgos. Sixty-three is rare air: only nine of the hundred player-nights this season have reached it. Figueroa had been falling since week 1 — twelfth, fourteenth, nineteenth, twentieth — and pulled three places back in a single Sunday.

Nick Mayville (58, 5-1) and Shane Brown (57, 5-1) matched the record if not the total, each climbing two, Brown back to ninth and his season best. And Zachary Gragg went 3-3, scored 57, and climbed two places to fifth — the clearest argument yet for a table built on points instead of wins. Gragg was sixteenth after week 1 and has climbed in three of the four weeks since, without once posting better than a 4-2.

Week 4's honor roll, revisited

The medal was a curse

This desk gave Michael Vandenburg performance of the week seven days ago for a 61-point night out of Group 5. He responded with 32 of 66. He won the opener 11–10 alongside Mayville — one of only two one-point games all week — and then lost five straight: 3–11, 6–11, 4–11, 5–11, 3–11. It is the second-worst night of the season, and it dropped him from fifteenth to twentieth. Last place, one week after the best night in the league.

Jeff Morano had the week's other collapse and the steeper fall in the table: 37 points on a 1-5, ninth down to sixteenth, the biggest single-week drop anyone has taken since week 3. And in Group 2, Justin Craig and Brian Blase — the pair this desk singled out last week for posting identical 4-2 nights as partners — were shut out 11–0 by Gragg and Malleo. Nobody gets to keep last week.

After Week 5

The top ten

Standings are ordered by percentage of available points won. Arrows mark upward movement only. Row one is a single seat: Jonathan Yin's weeks 1–3 and Ethan Lee's weeks 4–5, scored together under the rest-of-season substitution rule; the live standings page still carries the seat under Yin's name until the handoff is recorded in the app. No player used a one-week substitute in week 5. The full table of all twenty players is live here.