· 7 min read
Someone volunteers to run the club tournament. They draw a single-elimination bracket because that is what tournaments look like on television. Sixteen people turn up, eight of them lose their first match, and those eight stand around for two hours before going home having played once.
Format choice is the difference between a club night people ask you to repeat and one they quietly skip next time. It comes down to two numbers: how many matches each player is guaranteed, and how much court time you need.
Single elimination
Lose once, you are out. With N players the tournament is exactly N−1 matches, because every match eliminates exactly one person and you need to eliminate everyone but the winner.
| Entrants | Total matches | Rounds | Matches for the median player |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 7 | 3 | 1 |
| 16 | 15 | 4 | 1 |
| 32 | 31 | 5 | 1 |
That last column is the problem. In any single-elimination draw, half the field plays once. The median experience of your event is one match and a long drive home.
It is still the right choice sometimes: when court time is genuinely scarce, when the field is large and the day is short, or when the event is a final ranked stage after a group phase. It is the most time-efficient format per match played and it produces a clean champion. It is simply a poor way to spend a Tuesday evening with sixteen club members.
If you use it, seed it. An unseeded draw regularly puts your two strongest players in round one, which wastes the match everyone wanted to watch and hands someone a soft run to the final.
Double elimination
Two losses to go out. Players who lose drop into a consolation bracket and can still finish well — a losers' bracket run to the final is one of the better stories a club night can produce.
Match count is roughly 2N−2: fourteen matches for eight players, thirty for sixteen. Every player is guaranteed two matches, and the median player gets two or three.
The cost is scheduling complexity. The two brackets advance at different rates, and the grand final may need to be played twice if the losers'-bracket survivor wins the first one — they have, after all, only lost once at that point. That second match catches out first-time organisers constantly.
Double elimination is the sweet spot for a competitive club championship with 8–16 entrants and a full day or two evenings available. It is forgiving of one bad start, which matters when half your field warmed up for four minutes.
Round robin
Everyone plays everyone. Total matches are N × (N−1) / 2, which grows quadratically and gets out of hand faster than people expect.
| Entrants | Total matches | Matches per player | Court-hours at 30 min/match, 2 courts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 15 | 5 | 3.75 |
| 8 | 28 | 7 | 7 |
| 12 | 66 | 11 | 16.5 |
| 16 | 120 | 15 | 30 |
Sixteen players is thirty court-hours. That is not a club night, that is a season.
Round robin is the best format that exists for small groups — up to about eight players — because everybody plays everybody and the standings are genuinely meaningful rather than a product of the draw. Above eight, you split into groups of four or five and play a knockout between group winners. That hybrid is what most well-run club leagues actually do.
One practical note: decide your tiebreak rule before you start, and announce it. Head-to-head, then games difference, then points difference is the usual ladder. Nothing sours a round robin like inventing the tiebreak after the three-way tie has already happened.
Swiss
Borrowed from chess, and badly underused in racket sports. Nobody is eliminated. Each round, you pair players with similar records — winners play winners, losers play losers — and you play a fixed number of rounds decided in advance.
The round count is roughly log₂(N): five rounds resolves a field of thirty-two reasonably well, six handles sixty-four. Every player plays every round, so with 32 players and 5 rounds that is 80 matches and everyone gets five of them.
- Nobody travels across town to play once and leave.
- After two rounds players are matched against people of similar standard, so the matches stay competitive instead of becoming 6–0 blowouts.
- It scales to large fields in a fixed, predictable time — you know before you start exactly how long the evening runs.
The tradeoffs: it does not always produce an undisputed champion (two players can finish 4–1 without having met), the pairing step needs doing between every round, and players need to understand that a loss is not the end of their day.
For a large, mixed-ability club field in a fixed time slot, Swiss is very often the correct answer and almost nobody reaches for it.
Choosing in one paragraph
- Up to 8 players, time available — round robin. Best matches-per-player of anything.
- 8–16 players, competitive, a full day — double elimination.
- Large field, one fixed evening, everyone should play throughout — Swiss.
- Large field, very limited courts, a champion is the point — single elimination, properly seeded.
- Recurring league rather than one event — groups of four to six in round robin, with promotion and relegation between tiers.
Running one in HighFive
HighFive supports all four formats for racket sports — tennis, pickleball, badminton, padel, squash and table tennis — with fields from 2 to 128 entrants. You create the tournament, players request to join (or an organiser adds them), you seed and generate the bracket, and scores are reported by players and confirmed by an opponent or organiser so the bracket advances without one person doing data entry all night.
Everything is private to the people you invite, there is no entry fee, and the results feed each player's match record and head-to-head history.
Run your next club night in HighFive
Create a tournament in any of the four formats, share one link or QR code, and let scores confirm themselves. Free to create, free to join.