A round robin tournament is a format where every player, or every team, plays every other player or team exactly once. Nobody is eliminated. The winner is whoever finishes with the best record when the full schedule has been played.
It comes from the older sense of "round robin" — a circular petition where every name gets equal weight. Applied to sport, it means every entrant gets an equal share of games.
The organizer builds a schedule where each pairing appears once. Everyone plays that schedule in full. At the end, results are ranked by:
Games are played across the available courts in parallel to keep the event moving.
For N players, total games = N × (N − 1) ÷ 2 . In table form:
For pickleball doubles you can also run a rotating-partners round robin (each partnership plays once) or a fixed-teams round robin (each team plays every other team once).
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