Apologies for going down a rabbit hole here :).
I"m building out a list of matchups for a golf tournament. The player pool is divided - three teams of twelve. We're currently moving teams around, playing with matchups, etc. As we move players around, I want their handicaps to follow. I"m not skilled enough to figure out index+match when the data is in three separate tables. But what I do know is that handicap is always one call to the right of the player name, and so what I really want is an indirect reference that references another reference (lol).
In the table above ... two separate tables of players. Building the matchups on the right. G5 contains "=b4", and so gets populated with 'Bill'. What I was gunning for was something I could put into H5 that would say "ah, I see you referenced cell b4, I'll get the value from one to the right of b4" and then it would resolve itself to a reference of "=b5", and thus populate itself with '5'.
I think from what you said above that Index can handle searching across multiple tables. I think that's the official answer. What I've done is moved to one large player table, and am now using index+match, and all is well.
It's also hard to explain things in writing, and we've now officially spent more time messing with this than it's taken me to just rearrange the data into one big table :). I really do appreciate ya'lls suggestions.