Round robin when the point of the day is play time and a fair table. Double elimination when the point of the day is a champion, and one unlucky match should not end somebody's event.
Decide from three numbers before you decide from tradition: how many teams, how many courts, and how many hours you have the courts booked.
Every team meets every other team once: N−1 rounds and N(N−1)/2 matches. Standings run on wins first, then a published tiebreaker.
Strengths: identical game count for every team, no early exits, results good enough to use as seeds or ratings input, and odd team counts work fine with a rotating bye.
Weaknesses: matches grow quadratically — 8 teams is 28 matches, 12 teams is 66. Court demand stays flat all day, so the schedule is hard to compress once you are running late.
Every team plays in a winners bracket until it loses, then drops into a losers bracket. A second loss ends the event for that team, so a 16-team draw runs about 30 matches (roughly 2N−1) instead of the 15 a single elimination needs.
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