The americano draw, done before you reach the court

An americano is a padel tournament where people sign up on their own, without a partner. New pairs are formed every round: you play one round with someone, the next with someone else, and the standings are individual. Scoring is by games won, not matches, so it does not matter who you are drawn with.

That is why it is the format for a single afternoon: you do not need to bring anyone, being drawn with the weakest player does not sink you and being drawn with the best does not save you. It fits inside the usual two-hour court booking, and at the end there is a table.

What it is not: a league (there the teams are fixed and it runs for months) or a knockout bracket, where whoever loses goes home.

If you play pickleball, you already know this format under another name: a rotating round robin, sometimes called a shuffle or a mixer. Everyone signs up alone, partners change every round and the scoring is individual. That is an americano, and the draw on this page is the same draw: it only asks how many players you are and how many courts you have.

It works the same in tennis, where the usual names are a social or a round-robin doubles session. Nothing changes in the math: a match is four people, the pairings rotate, and whoever is left over from the multiples of 4 sits out in turn.

The problem is harder than it looks: split everyone into different pairs every round, trying to make sure nobody repeats a partner, that everyone plays the same number of matches and that the byes fall evenly. It is a variant of the social golfer problem, and with numbers that are not a multiple of 4 there is no perfect solution.

What happens here is that the best possible split is found: everyone plays the same, nobody repeats a partner and nobody sits out two rounds in a row. And then it says what it could not manage: if with those rounds and those people it was impossible not to repeat, the page says so.