Free round robin generator for tennis doubles
Set the players, the courts and the rounds, and get a full doubles rotation where nobody repeats a partner and nobody sits out twice in a row. Works in your browser: no account, no signup, nothing to install.
Use real names instead of Player 1, 2, 3…
How the draw works
Every round the generator looks at what has already happened: who has partnered whom, who has played against whom, and who has already sat. It then searches for the arrangement that repeats the least.
It cannot check every option. Seventeen players on four courts allow roughly 3.6 billion ways to arrange 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. Eight players over seven rounds gives twenty eight different pairs and no repeats at all.
For whoever runs the club night
Club nights and social mixers run on somebody arriving early with a clipboard and working out the pairs while members drift in. It is the one job nobody volunteers for twice, because doing it well and playing at the same time is not possible.
The part that is genuinely hard is not the first round, it is the fourth. By then you are trying to remember who has already played with whom, who has sat out, and who has been on court three all session, while four people stand waiting and one has just texted to say they are not coming.
This page does that part, for nothing. No account, no trial, no demo of a better version behind a wall. You get the finished rotation, you can print it, and you need never come back.
Scoring is the decision you make first
Tennis is the only common doubles sport where the scoring does not drop into a rotation cleanly. Fifteen, thirty, forty, deuce, advantage: none of it produces a number you can split between two pairs when the court time runs out.
There are two honest ways round it, and clubs use both. Count rallies and set a pool, say 24 points shared between the pairs, so a round ends 15:9 and both numbers always add up. Or keep tennis scoring and fix the round at a number of games, which is what Fast4 already does: first to four, no advantage, and a tiebreak at three all.
Rallies give you a real individual ranking, because a 15:9 says far more than a 4:2. Games are more familiar and easier to propose to a group that has never played anything else. Decide before the first round, not after somebody asks how the standings work.
A new partner every round, and the points are yours
In a standard round robin the pairs are fixed and every pair meets every other pair. In a rotating one your partner changes every round and the points belong to you, not to the pair.
So when your court finishes 15:9, you and your partner each take 15, and next round you are on opposite sides of the net. The player at the top of the sheet at the end is the one who played best all session, not the one who happened to draw the club's best server.
This is also what makes a mixer actually mix. Fixed pairs for two hours and the session is four separate matches that happen to share a car park.
Courts, players and what fits in the booking
Doubles puts four on a court, so eight players need two courts, twelve need three, sixteen need four. Anybody above that sits the round out, and the generator's job is to make sure it is never the same people.
Eight players on two courts is the one size where the format completes: seven rounds and every player has partnered every other player exactly once.
Tennis rounds run longer than padel or pickleball, about fifteen minutes for a pool of 24 or a first-to-four. A two hour booking is therefore seven rounds once you have paid for arrivals and changeovers, not the nine the arithmetic promises.
Mixed levels and mixed doubles
A rotation is kinder to a spread of levels than fixed pairs, because nobody is stuck for two hours and the mismatch lasts one round instead of the whole session.
If your club night is mixed doubles, use the Mixicano draw instead: it builds every round so that each pair is one man and one woman, which is the rule most mixed nights already follow informally and then argue about at round four.
If the spread is very wide, the Mexicano draw pairs people off the current standings from round two, so after a round or so you are playing with and against people hitting like you.
Questions organisers ask
- How do you run a tennis round robin with rotating partners?
- Decide the scoring first, either a pool of rallies or a fixed number of games, then draw the rounds so nobody repeats a partner and nobody sits twice running. The generator above does the draw.
- How do you score a tennis Americano?
- Either count rallies to a shared pool of 16 or 24, so a round ends 15:9 and the numbers add up, or play first to four games in the Fast4 style and give the round to whoever is ahead when time runs out.
- How many courts do I need for 16 players?
- Four. Doubles puts four on a court, so sixteen divides exactly and nobody sits out.
- How many rounds fit in two hours?
- About seven, with rounds of roughly fifteen minutes. Ten minutes go at the start on arrivals and reading out the draw, and a couple of minutes go on every changeover.
- Can everyone play with everyone?
- Only with eight players or fewer. Eight needs seven rounds and a two hour booking gives seven. Twelve would need eleven rounds, which no club night provides.
- Is this the same as Americano?
- Yes. Americano is padel's name for the same format: partners rotate, scoring is individual, rounds end on a shared number. Only the scoring needs translating into tennis.
After the schedule, the session still has to run
The rotation is the easy half. The hard half moves: two people drop out an hour before, three more ask to come, and the scores live on a phone that keeps locking itself.
That is what MyPadel does. You open a session and send one link. Players add and remove themselves, the rounds 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 session needs a free organiser account, because a session has to belong to somebody.