Free Americano generator for padel

Set the number of players, courts and rounds, and get a full Americano schedule where nobody repeats a partner and nobody sits out twice in a row. Works in your browser: no account, no signup, nothing to install.

Players
8
Courts
2
Rounds
6
8 on court at a time, 0 resting each round.
Use real names instead of Player 1, 2, 3…

How the draw works

Every round the generator looks at what has already happened so far: who has partnered whom, who has faced whom, and who has already sat out. It then searches for the arrangement that repeats the least.

Full enumeration is not possible, 17 players on 4 courts allow roughly 3.6 billion arrangements of a single round, so it runs a local search with random restarts, the same code the live product uses.

One thing it will not do: put two players together twice while a fresh pairing is still available. With 8 players over 6 rounds you get 24 different pairs and no repeats at all.

A free tool for whoever ends up organising

Every padel group has one person who books the court, counts who is coming, works out the pairs and then tries to play while holding the score in their head. This page is for that person, and it costs nothing, has no account and no trial that runs out.

The generator does the part that is genuinely hard to do by hand: arranging the rounds so that partners do not repeat, opponents are spread out, and the people who sit out are not the same people every time. It runs in the browser, so it works at the court on a phone with one bar of signal, and the schedule is there before anybody has finished warming up.

You can type the real names instead of Player 1, 2, 3, which sounds small and is not. A sheet with names on it gets read; a sheet of numbers gets ignored and somebody ends up shouting the pairs across two courts every round.

Nothing on this page is a demo of something better behind a wall. The schedule it produces is the finished thing, it is yours, and you can take it away and never come back.

How many players, how many courts, how many rounds

A padel court holds four people, so the arithmetic starts there: two courts take eight players at a time, three courts take twelve, four take sixteen. Anybody beyond that number sits out the round, and the generator's job is to make sure the same people are not the ones sitting.

Eight players on two courts is the cleanest social there is. Everybody plays every round, nobody rests, and after seven rounds every player has partnered every other player exactly once. If your group is eight and your booking is ninety minutes, you do not need to think about any of this again.

Twelve players on two courts is the other common case, and it behaves differently: eight play and four rest each round, so over three rounds everyone has rested once. The group is bigger, the game is more social, and each player gets roughly two thirds of the court time. Twelve on three courts removes the resting entirely and needs eleven rounds for a full partner rotation, which no booking is long enough for. That is fine. A complete rotation is not the goal, a fair one is.

For rounds, divide the booking rather than guess. A round played to sixteen points takes about twelve minutes once people stop warming up, so a ninety-minute slot comfortably holds six, and seven if everyone arrives on time. Set the number before the first serve and announce it: an Americano that ends because the court ran out is an Americano with no winner.

Americano, Mexicano, Mixicano or King of the Court

They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one is the most common way a game goes flat.

Americano fixes the rotation in advance. Everybody meets everybody, the strong and the weak are mixed by the schedule rather than by results, and nobody can work out halfway through that they are already out of it. It is the right default for a group that plays together regularly and cares more about the game than the table.

Mexicano redraws the pairs after every round from the current standings, usually putting first with fourth and second with third. It keeps the top of the table close and gives a late run a chance, but it also means the schedule cannot be printed in advance, and it punishes a group where the gap between the best and the worst player is wide: the strongest player keeps getting the weakest partner.

Mixicano is an Americano with one extra rule, that every pair is one man and one woman. It is the format for a mixed group that wants the mixing to be real rather than accidental, and it needs an even split to work cleanly.

King of the Court is not a rotation at all, it is a ladder. Winners move up a court, losers move down, and over an hour the group sorts itself by level without anybody having to seed it. It suits a drop-in night where people arrive at different times and the standard varies a lot, and it suits a competitive group that finds Americano too polite.

Scoring an Americano, and the three places it goes wrong

Every round is played to a fixed number of points rather than to games or sets. Sixteen is the usual choice, twenty-four if the rounds are long, thirty-two for a tournament. The two pairs split that number between them: a round to sixteen that finishes eleven to five gives eleven points to each player in the winning pair and five to each player in the losing one. Totals are personal, and the table at the end is a list of individuals, not of teams.

The first place it goes wrong is the target moving. One court finishes a round to sixteen while another, in the same game, plays to twenty-one because somebody misheard. Those two results are not comparable and the whole table is quietly wrong. Say the number out loud before the first round and write it where everyone can see it.

The second is a round that never gets recorded. One pair walks straight into the next match, the score lives in somebody's head for ten minutes, and by the time it is asked for it has become a guess. Record at the net before anybody leaves the court.

The third is the tie. Two players end on the same total more often than you would expect, especially with six rounds and sixteen points. Decide in advance how you break it, by head to head or by points conceded, because deciding afterwards always looks like it favoured somebody.

Running the game

Build the schedule for the number of people who will actually be there, not the number in the group chat. The most common failure of a printed Americano is that it was generated for twelve and ten turned up, which breaks every round after the first.

Late arrivals are easier than they look. If somebody is twenty minutes away, start without them and add them to the next regeneration rather than holding the court: a padel booking is the one thing in the game that cannot wait. If they are already playing when a round changes, finish the round first and rebuild from the next one.

Dropouts hurt more, because the number falls below a multiple of four and suddenly people are resting who were not supposed to. This is exactly where a regenerated schedule beats a printed one: you change the number, the rest of the game rebuilds, and nobody has to argue about whose turn it was.

Keep the courts named the way the club names them. Court 1 and Court 2 on your sheet while the club calls them 3 and 4 produces one lost pair every single round, and that pair will be the one that was winning.

When a sheet of paper is enough

Four players on one court do not need a generator. There are exactly three ways to pair four people, you play all three, it takes forty-five minutes, and anybody can write that on the back of a receipt.

The generator starts earning its place at eight, and becomes hard to do without at twelve and up. That is the point where the number of possible arrangements stops being something a person can hold in their head: seventeen players on four courts allow roughly three and a half billion ways to arrange a single round, and the difference between a good arrangement and a careless one is whether two people partner each other twice while somebody else has not played with them at all.

It also earns its place whenever the number is unstable. If your group reliably turns up at the size it promised, paper is fine. If it does not, every late change means rewriting the rest of the game by hand, at the court, with people waiting.

Questions organisers ask

How many players do I need for an Americano?
Four is the minimum, one court. Eight on two courts is the most common padel social. Above sixteen the format still works, you just meet a smaller share of the group.
Can I run an Americano with an odd number of players?
Yes. With 9, 10 or 11 players on two courts, one to three people sit out each round. The generator spreads the rest evenly so nobody sits out twice in a row.
How many rounds should we play?
Divide the booking by the round length. Two hours at 15 minutes a round is 8 rounds; 90 minutes at 12 minutes is 7. Set that number here and the whole game is drawn at once.
Is the draw random?
No, and that is the point. A random draw repeats partners constantly. This one scores every candidate arrangement against the game so far and keeps the least repetitive one.
How long does a padel Americano take?
Count about twelve minutes per round played to sixteen points, plus ten minutes of warm-up at the start. Six rounds fit a ninety-minute booking, eight fit two hours. Decide the number of rounds before you start rather than playing until the court runs out.
What is the difference between Americano and Mexicano?
Americano fixes the whole rotation in advance, so everybody meets everybody regardless of results. Mexicano redraws the pairs after each round from the standings, usually first with fourth and second with third. Americano is the fairer social format; Mexicano keeps the table tighter and more competitive.
How do you score an Americano in padel?
Each round is played to a fixed number of points, most often sixteen, and the two pairs split that number between them. Every player keeps the points their pair scored, so the final table ranks individuals rather than teams.
Can I run an Americano with 10 or 14 players?
Yes. With ten players on two courts, two people rest each round; with fourteen on three courts, two rest. The generator spreads the rest evenly, so over five rounds with ten players everyone has sat out once.
What happens if someone leaves halfway through?
Regenerate the remaining rounds for the new number. The points already scored still stand, because totals in an Americano are personal rather than per pair, so a player who leaves simply stops adding to their total.

After the schedule, the game still has to run

An Americano schedule is the easy half of the game. The hard half is everything that moves: somebody drops out an hour before, two more ask to come, and the score lives on a phone that keeps locking itself.

That is what MyPadel does. You open a game and send one link. Players put themselves on the list and take themselves off it, the pairs rebuild when the number changes, and the standings update on everyone's screen as the scores come in.

The generator above stays free and account-free, always. The live game needs a free organiser account, because a game has to belong to somebody.

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