If you have ever tried to organise a padel session for more than 16 players, you know the headache. Standard Americano tops out comfortably at around 16 players on four courts, and Mexicano relies on dynamic re-pairing that becomes unwieldy once you push past that number. Neither format was built for the reality that many clubs and weekly groups face: 20, 24, or even 28 players turning up, all expecting to play, all expecting it to be fair. The Mix format was designed from the ground up to solve exactly this problem.
The Problem with Large Groups
Running a tournament for 20 or more players is not simply a matter of adding more courts. The combinatorial challenge grows rapidly. With 28 players you have 378 possible pairings and thousands of possible match configurations per round. A good tournament needs to ensure that every player partners with a wide spread of other players, faces a variety of opponents, and does not end up stuck on the same court playing the same people round after round. Doing this by hand is practically impossible. Spreadsheets help, but they break down once you need to optimise across multiple constraints simultaneously.
There is also the fairness question. In a casual Americano with 28 players, some people inevitably sit out rounds while others play back to back. Weaker players can end up facing the strongest players repeatedly, making the experience frustrating rather than fun. The Mix format addresses every one of these issues with a structured, algorithmic approach.
How Mix Tournaments Work
The core mechanic is straightforward. Players are divided into tiers of four based on their skill ratings. For a full field of 28 players, that gives you seven tiers: Tier 1 contains the four strongest players, Tier 2 the next four, and so on down to Tier 7, which holds the four beginners. Each round consists of seven matches running simultaneously, one per court, with four players on each court. That means all 28 players are active in every single round. Nobody sits out.
Across 15 rounds, the fixture engine mixes within-tier and cross-tier matches. Some rounds pit you against players in your own tier, testing you against opponents of similar ability. Other rounds bring together players from different tiers, creating the social mixing that makes padel events enjoyable. The balance between competitive and social rounds is what gives the format its name.
The Tier System Explained
Before the tournament begins, the organiser assigns each player a skill rating. Many groups use Playtomic ratings, but any consistent scale works. Players are then sorted from highest to lowest and grouped into tiers of four. This grouping is the foundation of every fixture decision the engine makes.
Within-tier matches are where the competitive edge comes in. When four players of similar ability share a court, the match is tight and every point matters. These rounds tend to produce the closest scores and the most intense rallies. Cross-tier matches, on the other hand, pair stronger players with weaker ones as partners, levelling the playing field and giving everyone a chance to learn from better players. The alternation between these two types of round keeps the tournament feeling fresh from start to finish.
The tier system also makes it easy for organisers to slot in new players. If someone joins the group for the first time, the organiser simply estimates their rating, and the algorithm places them in the appropriate tier. No complicated seeding brackets or manual adjustments required.
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Create Mix Tournament →Fixture Balance
One of the most important properties of the Mix format is how evenly it distributes partnerships and opponents. The fixture engine guarantees that each player partners with any other player at most twice across the entire tournament. Similarly, each player faces any given opponent no more than four times. These constraints are mathematically optimised so that every player experiences the widest possible variety of partners and opponents.
UberPadel generates these balanced fixtures automatically. The algorithm considers all possible round configurations and selects the set that minimises repetition while respecting the tier structure. For organisers, this means no manual fixture tweaking and no arguments about unfair draw. The system handles it.
Why 15 Rounds?
With 28 players spread across seven courts, 15 rounds strikes the right balance between having enough data for a meaningful final ranking and keeping the event to a reasonable length. Each player plays exactly 15 matches, which provides a solid statistical foundation for the leaderboard. A player who performs consistently across 15 matches with different partners has genuinely earned their ranking. It also means the tournament can comfortably run in a three- to four-hour session, depending on match length, which fits neatly into a typical club booking window.
Scoring
The Mix format uses the same individual point accumulation system as Americano. In each match, the available points are split between the two teams (for example, in a match to 32 points the winning team might score 20 and the losing team 12). Each player on the winning team receives 20 points, and each player on the losing team receives 12. Your points carry across all 15 rounds regardless of who your partner was in each round. At the end of the tournament, the player with the highest total across all rounds wins. This system rewards consistent individual performance while acknowledging that padel is a team sport played with a rotating cast of partners.
When to Use Mix
The Mix format is ideal for any scenario where you have between 20 and 28 players and want a structured, fair tournament experience. Common use cases include:
- Weekly padel sessions where the same group of 20 or more players meets regularly and wants a competitive format that stays fresh week after week.
- Club events and social tournaments that need to accommodate a large turnout without anyone sitting on the sidelines.
- Corporate tournaments where players have mixed skill levels and the format needs to be inclusive while still producing a clear winner.
- Any group that has outgrown Americano or Mexicano and needs a format purpose-built for larger numbers.
If your group regularly has fewer than 20 players, standard Americano or Mexicano will serve you well. But the moment you cross that threshold, the Mix format is the most practical and fairest option available.