This is a game for a largish group of players. In fact it is more like a tournament format than a game as such. Our coach Saeed introduced us to this at our latest U3A training session to bring a little variation to our more usual ‘top court’ format. It might be worth considering a tournament format section on the web site to cover round robin and monrad systems as well as the usual knock-out main competition/plate competition format.

We had 8 players and 3 courts. Each court had 2 players on it and 2 players sitting out. Each pair on court played to 5 points. When one of them got to 5 he or she stayed on court and the loser went back to Saeed. On all 3 courts winners stayed on and losers went back to Saeed. The 2 players who had been sitting out and one of the initial then went on to the 3 courts to play the winners (avoiding sending the loser back to play their same opponent again). Each player carries their score with them throughout the tournament. For example, if a loser goes on court with the last winner (who is on 5 points) she takes with her her previous losing score, for instance 3. So the opening score at the beginning of their game is 5-3. The previous winner on 5 must get to 10 and the previous loser on 3 only needs to get to 5 to win the game. The general rule is that whoever gets to a multiple of 5 first is the winner and stays on the court to await another opponent. Winners stay on court and losers move onto another court. When someone gets to 50 they have won the tournament. If more than 1 player gets to 50 then they play off for the overall win.

In theory you would think the better players would win all the time and stay on court accumulating their 5, 10, 15 and so on. In practice it doesn’t work like that. At some point someone on, say 15 will be start a game with a losing opponent on 14. In this case the opponent only needs to win 1 point to get to 15, win the game and stay on the court. The previous winner starting on 15 would need to get to 20 without dropping a point in order to win ans stay on the court. So in practice the weaker players get to a point where they in effect have an advantageous handicap. Saeed said that he had not yet run a 50 up where one player has won all his or her games and got to 50 undefeated after 10 games!

In the tournament we played we were running run out of time and 3 of us were on 40. So we played 3 on a court for 10 minutes to decide the overall winner. This is not a format that would be used in a serious tournament no doubt but it was good fun, everyone one some games and enjoyed it.