Running a King of the Court session: courts, queue and round length

King of the Court — Queen of the Court, same format — is a ladder made of courts. Court 1 is the top. Win and you climb or stay; lose and you drop. The pair that loses on the bottom court joins the back of the queue, and the pair at the front of the queue comes in.

Pairs stay together. It is loud, it moves constantly, and it is the only format in PadelLoop where somebody can turn up halfway through without breaking anything.

Two courts minimum, and why

On one court there is nowhere to climb to. You have a series of matches with a queue, which is Winner Stays On, not this.

Two courts give you a top and a bottom and the movement starts working. Three or four give the ladder enough room that a pair can climb over an evening — that arc is what people remember, and it needs somewhere to happen.

Pairs stay together, so the player count has to be even. PadelLoop will not start on an odd number.

Round length is the setting people get wrong

Keep rounds short: 8 or 11 points, or a fixed five to seven minutes.

The movement between courts is the format. If rounds run fifteen minutes the ladder barely moves — over a ninety-minute session you get six rounds, which is not enough for anyone to travel anywhere. The evening becomes a set of separate matches with extra walking.

At 8 points you get a round every six or seven minutes including the changeover, and a pair can cross three courts in an hour. That is the experience the format is for.

If you are used to running Americanos to 24 points, this will feel too short the first time. Run it anyway and watch the room.

The queue is the real advantage

Americano, Mexicano, Monrad and the round robin all lock the player list when you press start. Adding someone means starting over with a longer list — which, on a drop-in night, means telling a person who just drove across town to sit and watch.

King of the Court has the queue built into the format. Pairs cycle out at the bottom and back in from the front. Someone arriving at 19:30 joins the queue and plays the next round.

That makes it the right format for open club sessions, for the hour before a scheduled tournament starts, and for any night where you genuinely do not know how many people are coming.

What it is not

It is not Winner Stays On. There the winners hold one court and challengers come to them; movement is one-directional and the queue is the only way in. Here winners move up and losers move down, so the ladder sorts itself in both directions and your court number is a rough statement of where you stand.

It is also not a social format in PadelLoop's sense: the table stays on the organiser's own screen. No big screen for the hall, no share link, no CSV export. For a drop-in session that matters less than it would for a tournament — people are watching the courts, not a table — but know it before you promise a screen.

Running one, in practice

Announce three things and it runs itself: court 1 is the top, winners climb and losers drop, and losing on the bottom court means joining the queue.

Then keep the rounds short and stay out of the way.

How the queue actually moves

Say four courts and ten pairs. Courts 1 to 4 have eight pairs on them; two wait.

Each round, the winners on courts 2, 3 and 4 move up one. The losers on courts 1, 2 and 3 move down one. On court 4 — the bottom — the losing pair leaves the ladder and joins the back of the queue, and the pair at the front comes in at court 4.

So a pair entering from the queue starts at the bottom and has to win its way up, and a pair that has been losing gradually falls out and gets a rest. Over an hour that produces a rough sorting without anybody keeping a table.

With more courts the ladder is longer and the climb is slower. With more pairs than courts the queue is doing real work and people get regular breaks, which on a drop-in night is a feature rather than a cost.

Scoring and what to write down

Each round is a single short match to a fixed number of points. There is no cumulative table to maintain — the court you are on is the standing.

Some clubs do keep a tally: a point for every round survived on court 1, or a simple win count. If you want a champion at the end, that is how you get one. If you want a session, do not bother — the format works better when nobody is tracking.

A 90-minute session, planned

Four courts, twelve pairs, rounds to 8 points.

A round takes six to seven minutes including the walk. Ninety minutes gives you thirteen or fourteen rounds. A pair entering at the bottom can reach court 1 in three wins, so there is time for several complete arcs. Eight pairs on court at a time and four in the queue means each pair rests roughly one round in three.

That is the shape to aim for. If you find yourself running five rounds in ninety minutes, your matches are too long — cut the target score before you change anything else.

Where it goes wrong

Rounds too long. Covered above, and it is the most common failure by a distance.

One court. Not this format. Run Americano instead.

Treating it as a tournament. There is no fair final standing here — a pair that arrives late cannot climb as far as one that has been on court since the start. If somebody needs to win something, run a format that ranks, then play King of the Court afterwards while people are packing up.

The rules and a setup link are on the King/Queen of the Court page. If you want a ranked result at the end rather than a session, Monrad is the format that produces one.