Round robin generator

A rotating-partner round robin (clubs also call it a mixer or social round robin) is the usual way to run doubles for a group that turns up without fixed partners: partners change every round, and over the session players are scheduled to partner with and play against everyone else. Pick the number of players and courts below. The generator lays out every round, keeps sit-outs even, never pairs the same two partners twice, and checks its own result underneath the schedule. How it does that is explained further down.

The method: the circle method, applied to doubles

Round-robin schedules for teams or singles players are usually built with the circle method. Number the competitors, keep competitor 1 in a fixed position and move everyone else one place around a circle each round; each round's pairings are read off the circle, and the rotation stops when the next step would repeat the first round. With an odd number of competitors a dummy is added, and whoever is drawn against the dummy has a bye that round. Berger tables, named after the Austrian chess master Johann Berger, who credited Richard Schurig as their inventor, are written-out round-robin pairing tables widely used in tournament planning.

Rotating-partner doubles needs one more step, because every game has two partnerships and two opponents. This generator therefore rotates a whole starting round (a list of courts with partners and opponents) instead of a single list of pairings. Each new round, every player number on the card goes up by one, wrapping from the top back to 1, and for 4, 8 and 12 players the highest number stays where it is, just as competitor 1 does in the circle method.

1. Round 1 is the starting round from the table below: court 1 (top) 1 & 2 vs 3 & 5, court 2 (bottom) 4 & 7 vs 6 & 8. The yellow band is the kitchen, the dashed line the net.
2. Round 2: every number from 1 to 7 has gone up by one, so 1 & 2 vs 3 & 5 becomes 2 & 3 vs 4 & 6.
3. Wrap-around: 7 goes back to 1, so "4 & 7" becomes "5 & 1".
4. Player 8 is fixed, like competitor 1 in the circle method; only partners and opponents around player 8 change.
5. The ring: the seven moving numbers. After seven rounds every number is back where it started and the cycle is complete.

Starting rounds for full courts

When every court is full (4, 8 or 12 players) or there is exactly one player left over (5 or 9), the generator uses these fixed starting rounds. They were found by a computer search for starting rounds whose rotation gives every pair the same number of games together and against each other.

Over a full cycle each of these schedules has every player partner every other player exactly once and play against each of them exactly twice; with 5 or 9 players everyone sits out exactly once. Choosing fewer rounds simply stops the cycle early, so partners still never repeat.

Other group sizes: sit-outs first, then the fewest repeats

With 6, 7, 10 or 11 players, or with fewer courts than the group could fill, some players must sit out each round. For each round the generator:

1. Chooses who sits out: the players with the fewest sit-outs so far, with ties drawn at random. This keeps everyone's sit-out count within one of everyone else's.
2. Tries every way to split the remaining players into partners and courts, and scores each: a repeat partnership costs 1,000 points, and each meeting between two opponents costs 2 × (times they have already met) + 1.
3. Keeps the lowest score. It builds 60 complete schedules this way and keeps the one with the fewest repeat partners, then the most even opponent counts.

Uneven playing time is sometimes just arithmetic. Six players on one court means two sit out every round; over five rounds that is 10 sit-outs among 6 players, so four players sit twice and two sit once.

What testing showed

The generator's code was run for every player count from 4 to 12, every possible number of courts, every round count up to the full cycle and 21 random seeds (including the page's default seed). In every case no player appeared twice in one round, no two players partnered more than once, and sit-out counts never differed by more than one. Full-cycle results:

Each schedule you generate is checked the same way, and the result is printed under it.

Running it at the courts

• Game length. Games are normally played to 11 points, win by 2; tournament games may go to 15 or 21. Timed rounds keep courts in step: one round-robin guide suggests capping rounds at 10–12 minutes, and one club runs 12-minute blocks after which players change courts and teammates. The minutes box above multiplies out the session length.
• Familiar shapes. On a single court of four, the schedule is the classic three games in which each player partners each of the other three once. A Missouri parks department's ladder rules have a foursome play three games "in a round robin fashion" and a five-player court play four 11-point games each, the same game counts this generator gives for 4 and 5 players.
• Keeping score. The printout has a score line for every game. Ladder rules from Mount Vernon, Ohio rank players by total points scored divided by points possible; the round-robin formats on Pickleheads rank players by win percentage. Agree on one before the first serve.
• Someone to run it. A pickleball.com mixer guide recommends a host who calls the rotations, warns that leaving rotations to participants "consistently leads to confusion," and plans one court per 4–8 participants.

For bracket events and pool play, see pickleball tournament formats. For weekly play that moves players up and down courts by results, see how ladder leagues work. For the score call itself, see pickleball scoring.