Help / Tournaments & Brackets / Formats

Tournament Formats — A Guide for TDs

Every division on a tournament event has a Play Format. The format decides how partnerships work, how matches are generated, and what a “medal round” looks like. This page covers what each format does, when to pick it, and what to expect during play.

Quick reference

Fixed-partner formats

Singles, Doubles, Trips, and MLP all share the same idea: partnerships are locked at registration and stay locked through the whole event. Winners are teams, not individuals. Team standings drive medal-round seeding when enabled.

Singles

Team size 1. Every match is 1v1. Standings and ELO both work per-player. This is the format any singles ladder uses.

Doubles

Team size 2. Register as a captain and invite your partner (or accept someone else’s invite). If a captain hasn’t assembled a full team by the deadline, the division’s looking for team flow can auto-pair singletons.

Trips

Team size 3. Same captain/invite flow as doubles. Common in 3-a-side pickleball leagues.

MLP

Team size 4. Team plays as a unit — the lineup rotates through Men’s Doubles, Women’s Doubles, two Mixed Doubles slots, and a Dreambreaker finale. Best for cohesive teams; needs captains who can manage lineups game-to-game.

Scramble

Everyone registers solo. Partners rotate every round. A scramble is scored per-player: your record is the sum of games you won across all rounds, regardless of who you were playing with. Ideal for socials where nobody has to find a partner beforehand.

Setup: pick players-per-side (2 for doubles-shape, 3 for trips-shape). Set total rounds; the scheduler picks partnerships so every player partners as many different people as the round count allows.

Standings:ranked by wins, then point differential. Head-to-head isn’t used — the same two players might have been on opposite sides one round and the same side another, so H2H doesn’t cleanly resolve ties in scrambles.

Mixed Scramble

Same solo-registration as a regular Scramble, but every registration carries a gender track(M or W). Enforces equal M and W counts at pool generation — the TD sees an error if a mixed pool doesn’t balance.

How rounds are generated

Mixed Scramble runs in two phases by default:

• Phase 1 — Mixed rounds (first N rounds for N M + N W). Every match is (guy+girl) vs (guy+girl). Every guy partners every girl exactly once via a Latin-square rotation.
• Phase 2 — Gendered rounds(next N−1 rounds). Each round runs one men’s match and one women’s match on separate courts simultaneously. Every guy partners every other guy exactly once; every girl partners every other girl exactly once.

The gendered tail only applies to pools of N ≤ 4 per gender. For a pool of 4 M + 4 W, total default rounds = 2N − 1 = 7 (4 mixed + 3 gendered), 14 matches, every player plays 7 games. Standings combine across both phases and pick a single overall winner.

For pools of 5 or more per gender, the gendered tail is skipped automatically — only the mixed phase runs (N rounds). The mixed phase alone is already a full-length event at that size; more play time should come from a medal round rather than another 2N − 1 of pool play. TDs who want more can enable the medal round on the division.

When to use Mixed Scramble

• Small coed pools (4+4 or smaller). Best fit — the phased schedule fills a 2-hour block cleanly, one crown, no separate medal round needed.
• Coed social where everyone wants to play with everyone. The mixed phase covers all M+W pairings; the gendered tail (small pools only) also gets same-gender partnerships.
• Medium fields (5+5 through 8+8): use Mixed Scramble with medal round enabled. Pool play stays balanced (mixed pairings only); the medal round decides champions.
• Larger fields (9+ per gender): split into multiple pools of ~4 M + 4 W each, or use regular Scramble with 2+ pools + medal round.

Trimming rounds

If your time budget is tight, override num rounds at pool-generation time. Pass N (the count per gender) to get just the mixed phase — 4 rounds for 4+4, matching what Mixed Scramble did before the phased default. Anything less than N truncates the mixed phase but never duplicates partnerships.

Hat Draw

Players register solo; the TD draws pairs from “the hat” after registration closes. Once the draw is locked, pairs are treated as fixed doubles teams through the rest of the event (bracket, medal round, standings). Three algorithms:

Random

Deterministic shuffle. Uses a seeded RNG so the “preview draw” the TD sees before locking is the same one that gets locked. No rating input required — good when you don’t have DUPR data or don’t want to.

Semi-Balanced

Splits players into a top half and bottom half by rating, then randomly pairs one from each. Every team ends up with roughly one stronger and one weaker player without being tightly constrained.

Balanced

Tries to minimize the rating spread across all pairs. Every team’s combined rating is as close as possible to every other team’s. The most competitive option — teams should feel evenly matched.

Preview and lock

Before locking, the TD sees a full preview of the draw with per-team rating totals. Rerolling produces a different shuffle. Locking is one-way — after that, pairs are frozen and matches generate against the locked teams.

Medal Round

A medal round is a second stage that runs after pool play. The top qualifiers advance and play fresh matches to decide 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Pool play stats do not carry over — the medal round is its own scoring window.

How to enable

On the division’s Event Manage tab, click Enable Medal Round. This sets has_medal_round in the config and unlocks the medal-round settings (advancement count, medal-round scoring rules, finals rules).

Medal round modes

Scramble medal rounds have a Medal round mode dropdown that decides how qualifiers are grouped and paired:

• Ranked pools(default) — the classic behavior. Qualifiers are chunked into medal pools by rank (Pool A = top qualifiers, Pool B = next tier, etc.) and each pool plays its own scramble. For Mixed Scramble, qualifiers get partitioned by gender_track first — Men’s medal pools and Women’s medal pools run in parallel and each crowns its own gold: one King, one Queen. Same-gender partnerships inside each medal pool.
• Mixed micro-pools (Mixed Scramble only) — qualifiers are grouped into 2M + 2W buckets by rank. Bucket A = top 2 men + top 2 women, Bucket B = next 2 + next 2, and so on. Each bucket runs a 2-round mini-scramble where every guy plays with each girl once. Combined standings inside the bucket determine top guy and top girl of that bucket. Two courts per bucket; every player plays 2 games.
• Fixed pairs (coming soon) — top qualifiers get paired by rank into fixed doubles teams (Seed 1 + Seed 2, or G1 + W1 for mixed) and play a standard single-elimination bracket (QF → SF → F). The dropdown value is reserved so events can be pre-configured, but medal-round generation returns an error until the bracket-advancement wiring lands.

When to skip the medal round

• Small pools (fewer than 5 per pool) — the phased Mixed Scramble already produces a full 2-hour experience and one clear winner without a medal round.
• Social events where a “top X advance” step would feel more competitive than the vibe warrants.
• Time-boxed 2-hour events where an extra bracket round won’t fit.

Picking a format

Time budget rough guide

Assumes 20–25 minute matches on 2 courts. Larger court count scales down the wall-clock roughly linearly for scramble formats; fixed-partner pool play doesn’t parallelize as cleanly.

Changing a division’s format

Open the event’s Manage Event tab, click a division’s Edit, and pick from the Play Format dropdown. Switching formats after registrations are open is allowed but flagged: format-specific config (partner pairings, gender enforcement, hat-draw locks) gets cleaned up so the new format starts clean. Existing registrations stay in place; the TD may need to prompt participants to update partnerships when moving from a team format to a scramble.

Questions or edge cases not covered here? Ping support@q4fun.com — the answers usually end up in this doc.