Padel Rotation Planner — fair 2v2 rounds for 4–10 players

Two pieces of arithmetic and one rule. The number of rounds comes first: minutes booked ÷ minutes a match, rounded down and held between 3 and 12. Ninety minutes at twelve minutes a match is seven rounds; at fifteen it is six; at twenty it is four. Ask for a round count directly and the tool shows you the court time it implies instead.

Rest is a queue, not a decision. Everyone lines up in one order, the front of the queue sits out the round, then goes to the back — so nobody can sit twice before everybody has sat once, and over a night the rest is spread within a single round for every player. With five players that means one person out per round and a full circuit every five rounds.

Partners are chosen by exhaustion, not search. Four players on court can be split into two pairs exactly three ways, so the planner scores all three and takes the best. The score is 2 × repeated partnerships + 1 × repeated opponents, and the lowest score wins; ties go to the first split in canonical order, or — once the shuffle button has set a seed — to a seeded pick among the tied options. That 2:1 weighting is ours: partnering the same person again wastes a round twice over, whereas facing them again is only half as wasteful.

Four players is the one case with a provable answer, and the planner labels it. There are exactly three ways to split four people into pairs, so three rounds is the complete set: everybody partners everybody once, faces everybody twice, and nobody sits. Ask for more than three and the block repeats, because there is no fourth pairing to invent. The fairness table under the plan counts what actually happened — rounds played, rounds rested, and how many different partners each person got — so you can check the claim rather than trust it. The whole planner is a pure function of the player count, the round count and the seed; it runs in your browser and there is nothing to send anywhere.