Every entrant plays every other entrant once. That is the whole promise. Nobody is eliminated; the schedule is fixed up front; the winner is whoever finishes with the best record.
Everything else — rounds, byes, courts, tiebreakers — exists to make that promise practical to run in the time and space you have.
The standard scheduling trick is the circle method . Sit the players around a table. Keep one player fixed. Every round, rotate all the others one seat clockwise. The pairings for each round are whoever ends up across from each other. After N − 1 rounds every pairing has appeared exactly once.
Each round is a set of games that can be played at the same time. If you have C courts and N players (N even), each round runs N ÷ 2 games. If you have fewer courts than games per round, games queue within the round — round 2 does not start until round 1 finishes.
To estimate total event time: rounds × (average game length + turnover). A 15-minute game with 3 minutes of turnover across 5 rounds = 90 minutes.
With an odd number of players, one person sits out each round. That is a bye . Byes cycle so nobody gets more than one. A good generator distributes them evenly — Pickle IQ places byes so consecutive byes never fall on the same player.
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