Padel Rules & Formats

1. The basics: court, kit and the point of the game

Padel looks like tennis squeezed into a squash court, and that's not a bad mental model. It's a doubles game played by four on an enclosed court 20m long by 10m wide, divided by a net at 88cm in the centre. The walls — glass at the ends and parts of the sides, mesh elsewhere — are not just a boundary: they're in play, and learning to use the rebound is the whole craft of the game.

The kit

You play with a solid, stringless racket — short-handled, perforated, and nothing like a tennis racket — and a ball that looks like a tennis ball but is fractionally lower in pressure. Because the rackets are short and the court is enclosed, padel is far easier to pick up than tennis: a beginner can sustain a real rally on day one, which is exactly why the sport is spreading so fast.

How a point works

The serve is underarm: you bounce the ball, hit it below waist height, and it must land in the diagonal service box, just like tennis. From there the ball is live until someone fails to return it before its second bounce. The twist is the walls: after the ball bounces once on your side of the floor, it may carry on and rebound off your own back or side glass — and you're allowed to play it off that rebound. You may not, however, let the ball hit a wall before it has bounced on the floor on a return (more on that below). You can also lob the ball so it bounces and flies up over the back glass and out — a clean way to win the point. Games are won by reaching four points with a two-point margin; the catch is how those points are counted, which is the next section.

2. How padel scoring works

Padel borrows tennis scoring wholesale, so if you can score a tennis match you can score padel. There are three layers stacked on top of each other.

Points within a game

A single game runs 0 (love), 15, 30, 40, game. If both pairs reach 40 it's deuce, and a pair must then win two points in a row: the first is advantage, the second wins the game. (Some clubs play "golden point" — a single sudden-death point at deuce — to keep things moving; agree it before you start.)

Games within a set

Win six games, with a margin of two, to take a set. At 6–6 you play a tie-break — first to seven points, win by two — where scoring switches to plain numbers (1, 2, 3…). Pairs alternate who serves each game across the set.

Sets within a match

A full padel match is best of three sets — first pair to two sets wins. This is the format you'll see in tournaments and proper fixtures, and it's why ClubLono uses the "sets" scoring mode for padel rather than a single running points total: the natural unit of a padel result is the set.

For a club night, best-of-three is too long to rotate cleanly, so the common compromise is a single short set per round — first to six games (or even first to four), or a fixed-time round — and then everyone re-pairs. You're still scoring in true padel units, just one set at a time. ClubLono records the set score for each round and rolls it into the standings automatically, so the leaderboard at the end of the night reflects games won, not just who shouted loudest.

3. Rules people get wrong

Most newcomers arrive with tennis instincts, and padel quietly breaks a few of them. These are the ones that cause the most "wait, what?" moments on a club night.

• The serve is underarm, off a bounce. You can't smash a serve like in tennis. You bounce the ball behind the service line and strike it below waist height — get this wrong and it's a fault.
• The ball must bounce on the floor before it touches a wall. On a return, the ball has to hit the ground on your side first; if it strikes your glass before bouncing, you've lost the point. The wall rebound only counts after a floor bounce.
• You can't hit your opponents' walls directly. You may use your own back wall after a bounce, but you can't volley the ball so it hits the opponents' walls before bouncing on their floor — that's out.
• A serve off the side fence cage is a fault. In the service box the ball may touch the side glass after bouncing, but if a served ball hits the metal mesh fence, it's a fault — a subtle distinction that catches people out.
• The ball can go out over the back glass — and that's a winning shot. Lobbing the ball up and over the back wall so the opposition can't return it is legitimate and devastating; beginners often think it's "out" like a tennis baseline.
• You can play the ball back off your own wall after it's bounced. New players let a deep ball go, assuming it's lost — but if it bounced first, you can let it rebound off the glass and play it. Half of padel's fun lives in this rule.

4. Running a social session

A padel club night lives or dies on whether the games are close and everyone gets fair court time. With only four players per court and court time at a premium, the format does the heavy lifting.

Mexicano (recommended)

In a Mexicano, players don't keep a fixed partner. After each short round the field is re-sorted by results and re-paired so the closest-matched players meet — the leader partners someone lower down, strong meets strong at the top, and the games stay competitive all evening. It's the most sociable format going: you play with and against almost everyone, and a beginner is never stuck losing 6–0 all night to the same county-level pair. This is ClubLono's default for padel, and it's why mismatches sort themselves out without you doing any maths.

Sensible alternatives

• Americano — similar rotating, partner-swapping idea, but pairings are fixed by a round schedule rather than re-sorted on results. Simpler to run by hand; slightly less precise on balance. A good fallback if you want a fully predetermined round sheet.
• Fixed-pair round robin — players sign up as a pair and every pair plays every other pair. Best when people want to play with a chosen partner all night (couples, regular doubles teams) rather than rotate.
• King of the Court — winners move up a court, losers move down, repeated each short round. Fast, fun, naturally self-balancing, and great when you have three or more courts.

Rotation and fair matchmaking

Whatever format you pick, the two things that make a session feel fair are a queue nobody can skip and balanced fours. Set a clear round length up front — a single short set, first to six games, or a timed round — so courts finish together and nobody stands idle. ClubLono's queue handles the "who's on next" question, and the Mexicano engine handles the "who's with whom" question, so the host can actually play.

5. League formats for a season

Once you have regulars, a casual rotating night isn't enough on its own — people want something to climb. Because padel is fundamentally a doubles game, your league formats can run as individuals (re-paired each match) or as fixed pairs; both work, and ClubLono's racket-league stack supports either.

Ladders

A ladder ranks players (or pairs) in a single column; you challenge someone a rung or two above and swap places if you win. It's low-admin, runs continuously with no fixed calendar, and suits padel well because challenges slot naturally into whatever court time players can grab. Great for a club where attendance is fluid.

Box leagues

A box league splits everyone into small groups ("boxes") of four to six of similar standard. Within a box, everyone plays everyone over a fixed period (say a month); top finishers promote up a box, bottom finishers drop down. It's the best balance of competitive and sociable for most padel clubs — the games are always close because the boxes are seeded by standard, and promotion/relegation keeps it fresh each cycle.

Knockouts and round robins

For a one-off event or a club championship, a knockout bracket is the classic — quick to run, dramatic, but a bad day ends your tournament early. A round robin (everyone plays everyone) guarantees every entrant a full set of matches and is fairer over a single day, which is why it's a popular padel club-day format; for larger fields, group round robins feeding a knockout playoff give you the best of both.

6. How ClubLono runs padel

ClubLono is built around exactly the formats above, so you don't have to keep score on paper or seed a ladder by hand.

• Sets scoring, automatically tallied. Padel uses the "sets" scoring mode — you tap in each round's set result and ClubLono keeps the running standings, so the leaderboard is always correct without a spreadsheet.
• Mexicano by default. Club nights run as a Mexicano: after each round the app re-pairs the field into balanced fours using its built-in rating (HLR), which updates per game. Mismatches self-correct; beginners and strong players both get close games.
• A queue nobody can skip. Players join from their phone, see their position, and get called on when a court frees up — the host can override anything.
• Ratings that travel. The built-in rating keeps sessions fair, and because DUPR now rates padel as well as pickleball, results can feed a recognised national rating.

The casual session tooling — queue, Mexicano matching, sets scoring, standings — is on the free tier for a single club, with no time limit. Leagues are a Premium feature: ladders and box leagues across a season, multi-club hosting, kiosk mode for a court-side tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export all come with Premium (£19.99/month or £199.99/year, 14-day free trial), which also drops the platform fee on any paid sessions from 5% to 1%. So you can run sociable padel nights forever for free, and add structured competition the moment your regulars are ready for a season.