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Padel Positioning Board

Where to stand, live. Drag the ball and the opponents and the court answers — the floor lights up where your pair belongs, the chalk shows the run, and the strip underneath says why. No camera, no chatbot, no subscription: the same textbook rules a coach draws on a slate, computed on every frame.

Drag the ball. The light shows where your pair belongs.

Transition Cover the line

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      Method

      How the board decides where you belong

      The court is measured in fractions rather than metres: your baseline is 0, the net is 0.5, their baseline is 1, and the same for width, 0 to 1 across. Your half is cut into three depth bands — defence from 0 to 0.18, transition from 0.18 to 0.35, attack from 0.35 to 0.48 — and every number below is one of those fractions. Every one of them is also our figure: this is coaching convention written down as thresholds, not anything measured or published.

      The board reads the situation first, then picks a shape, in this order of precedence. Ball behind you while your pair's average depth is past 0.32, meaning you hold the net and have been lobbed: retreat together. Ball in your own back third, closer than 0.18 to your glass: defend. Both opponents in front of 0.66, so they own the net: defend, and prepare the lob. One opponent forward of 0.64 with the other behind 0.78, the one-up-one-back shape: split, stay honest in front of the volleyer and hunt the gap on the other side. Both opponents pinned behind 0.80: attack, take the net together. Anything else is transition.

      Then it places the two of you. The pair's centre follows the ball sideways — 0.5 + (ball's x − 0.5) × a factor that is 0.42 for a beginner, 0.52 at club level and 0.62 at open level, because better players shift further and trust each other to cover. The lateral half-gap between teammates is 0.21, tightening to 0.17 when the ball is central (between 0.40 and 0.60), and the depth comes from the shape: 0.11 defending, 0.12 retreating, 0.27 in transition, and 0.38, 0.40 or 0.42 attacking by level — the beginner target keeps more lob buffer on purpose. Targets are then clamped to the playable box, x from 0.10 to 0.90 and y from 0.05 to 0.46, and forced at least 0.18 apart so the board never asks two people to stand in the same place.

      Arrows are only drawn when a player is at least 0.05 away from where they should be, so the court stops nagging about a step nobody needs to take. All of it recomputes on every frame in your browser, with no camera and no account.

      Rivals is not affiliated with any padel federation and nothing here is coached, reviewed or official. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note above says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.

      The two places to stand, and the transit between them

      Padel has exactly two places to stand and one rule about how you get between them. The attacking base is side by side roughly a metre to a metre and a half off the net — close enough that a volley goes downward, far enough back that a lob over your head is still reachable. The defensive base is side by side again, but behind the service line and close to the back glass, where a hard ball has time to come off the wall and sit up for you. Everything else on the court is transit. The middle third of your half is no-man’s land: a ball landing at your feet there is too low to volley and too close to let bounce, which is why the players who look calm are simply never standing in it.

      What separates a pair from two individuals is the tether. Imagine a rope five or six metres long tied between you and your partner: when one of you is dragged wide to dig a ball out of the corner, the other does not hold position, they slide across with them and the whole team ends up shaded to that side. The court you give away on the far tram line is a much longer shot than the one you would give away through the middle, and the middle is where the ball goes. That single habit — move together, always — wins more points at club level than any shot you could spend a winter learning.

      The board above is that logic made visible, and it is deliberately dumb in the honest sense: a fixed list of rules with fixed numbers, run again every time you move a puck. Drag the ball into your back corner and it will tell one of you to dig and the other to cover the middle. Push both opponents to their glass and it will send you both forward. Stand your pair too close together on one wing and it paints the corridor you just opened in red. Nothing is being guessed at, which is exactly why you can argue with it — and why the answer never changes between one Tuesday and the next.

      Questions

      Where should I stand in padel?
      There are only two base positions and everything else is travelling between them. Attacking, you and your partner stand side by side about a metre to a metre and a half off the net — close enough to volley down, far enough back that a lob cannot land behind you. Defending, you stand side by side again but behind the service line, near the back glass, where you have time to let the ball come off the wall. The area in between, roughly the middle third of your half, is no-man's land: you pass through it, you never park in it, because a ball at your feet there can be neither volleyed nor let bounce. The rule that governs all of it is that the two of you move as one unit, shifting toward whichever side the ball is on so the middle never opens up.

      How does this board decide where to stand?
      With a fixed set of written rules and nothing else. There is no model, no camera and no chatbot behind it: the board reads five things — how deep each opponent is, which half the ball is in, how wide it is, how far up the court your pair is, and the level you picked — and runs them through the same textbook priorities a coach would use. Opponents own the net, so drop back and lift a lob. Opponents pinned deep, so take the net together. Ball behind you while you are up, so break back, ball-side player first. Every threshold is a number in one file, and that file is a straight port of the one the Rivals app ships. The app's own test suite came across with it, case for case, and a sweep that walks the ball and both opponents across the whole court adds a thousand-plus generated boards on top — every one of them re-run against the browser engine whenever a line of it changes. That is why it answers instantly and gives the same answer every time.

      What are the plays on this board?
      Ten short animated sequences that show the pair moving instead of describing it. Each one is four coached moments — pinned in the corner, a good lob followed by taking the net, defending the middle, a partner pulled wide, a short lob that forces a retreat, returning deep against a rushing server, a chiquita followed in, a bandeja to keep the net, playing a split pair, and a golden point — and the board eases between them so you watch the shape change rather than reading about it. You can pause anywhere, scrub back to the moment that matters, slow it to half speed, and every step carries one line explaining what just happened and why.

      Can a coach or trainer use this with a group?
      That is what Board mode is for. It drops the half-court rule so all five pucks move anywhere, and you can draw freehand chalk lines straight onto the court with a finger, undo them one at a time or wipe them all. When the shape is right, Copy board link puts the board inside the address itself — all five pucks, plus fifteen to twenty chalk lines of the long wall-to-wall sort or several dozen short coaching marks — so pasting it into the group chat is the whole of sharing. Draw past what an address will hold and the button says how many lines made it, rather than quietly dropping them. There is no account and nothing to set up: the link is the board.

      Does it work on a phone at the court?
      Yes. It is built thumb-first: the court owns the width of a phone screen, the pucks are big enough to grab with a glove on, and one finger owns the drag so a stray thumb cannot fight it. It is free, needs no account and no install, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with no signal, because every calculation happens on your device. The level and side you pick are saved in that browser, so the page opens where you left it.

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      Read next

      Where to Stand in Padel: Side-by-Side Movement Padel positioning in plain terms: the two home positions, the invisible rope between partners, how far off the glass to stand, and the three positioning sins. 8 min Own the Middle: Padel's Most Valuable Court Space Why the middle is padel's default target — lowest net, least angle back, and a decision two opponents have to make — plus when aiming there is wrong. 8 min Padel Doubles Tactics: The Complete Positioning Guide How padel doubles actually works: the two legal shapes, the wall of two at the net, who takes the middle, and the transition moments that decide matches. 12 min

      The court here is free. Your crew's real nights live in Rivals

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