King of the Court Pickleball

Ask ten pickleball groups how they run king of the court and you will get two completely different answers. One group means a single court where the winning pair holds it and everyone else lines up behind the fence. The other means a row of courts with winners climbing toward the top one and losers sliding back down. Both go by the same name, they play nothing alike, and picking the wrong one for your group is the reason a session ends with half the room watching.

There is no governing rulebook for this. USA Pickleball defines how the game is played, not how a drop-in night rotates, so king of the court is whatever the person holding the ball says it is. That is exactly why it needs saying out loud before the first serve. Below is both versions, the rules worth stating, and the waiting math that decides whether people spend the evening playing or standing.

1. The two formats that share the name

Winner stays on (the challenge court). One court is live. The pair that wins keeps it, the next two players in line come on as challengers, and the losers go to the back of the queue. It runs itself, it needs no schedule, and people can arrive or leave at any point without breaking anything. This is the version most American clubs mean, and the one built into the DillDraw draw tool.

The ladder (promotion and relegation). Courts are numbered, with one end designated the king court. Everybody plays a timed round at the same time. When the horn goes, the winning pair on each court moves one court toward the king end, the losing pair moves one court away, and the pairs split so nobody keeps the same partner. Winners on the king court stay put; losers on the bottom court stay put. It needs at least three courts to feel like anything, and it is the version most junior programmes and clinics use.

The practical difference: winner-stays rewards the strongest pair with unlimited court time, and the ladder guarantees everybody plays every round. One is a competition, the other is a machine for keeping bodies moving.

2. Winner stays on: the four rules to say out loud

Every argument at a drop-in session comes from one of these four being left unstated. Decide them before you start and nobody has to litigate anything at 7pm.

3. How long people actually wait

Winner-stays has one number that decides everything, and almost nobody works it out in advance. On a single doubles court, four people are playing and everyone else is in line. Each game sends two players to the back and pulls two off the front, so the queue advances by exactly two per game. Lose, and the number of games you sit is (players − 4) ÷ 2.

Those figures assume roughly eight minutes a game and one court. Add a second court and they halve; add a third and they drop by two thirds, because every court in play consumes two more people from the same queue.

Read the bottom row again, though, because it is the honest case against the format. Sixteen people on one court means a player who loses waits three quarters of an hour, and a pair that keeps losing waits that long every time. Above about ten players on a single court, winner-stays stops being a format and starts being a queue with a game attached. That is the point to either open another court or run something that guarantees everyone a turn — see printable round robin schedules for the alternative.

4. Running the ladder version

The ladder solves the waiting problem outright: with four players per court, nobody ever sits. It costs you the thing that makes winner-stays easy, which is that the ladder only works if all the courts finish together.

• Number the courts and name the top one. Tape a number on each net post. Court 1 is the king court; whichever end you pick, point at it so everyone knows which way is up.
• Use timed rounds, not games to a score. Eight to ten minutes. The whole thing moves on one horn, so a court still grinding through deuce breaks the rotation for everybody.
• Winners up, losers down, one court at a time. Winners on court 1 stay; losers on the bottom court stay. Everyone else shifts one.
• Split the pairs every round. When two players arrive on a new court, they split and partner one of the two already there. This is what keeps a ladder social instead of turning it into a team competition.
• Seed the first round however you like, then stop worrying about it. Two or three rounds is enough for the ladder to sort people by level on its own, which is the whole appeal — nobody had to rank anybody out loud. For the versions that do involve ranking, see splitting a mixed-skill group across courts.

With three courts you need twelve players, four courts sixteen. Fewer than three courts and there is not enough ladder for the climb to mean anything; run winner-stays instead.

5. Where king of the court goes wrong

Three failure modes, all predictable, all worth heading off:

• A wide skill spread. Winner-stays gives the best pair in the building unlimited court time and the weakest players a seat. If your group runs from 2.5 to 4.5, either cap the king at three wins or do not run this format at all.
• Odd numbers. The queue works in pairs, so an odd player count leaves someone perpetually half a slot out of sync. With five, seven or nine people, singles king of the court is the cleaner answer.
• No standings. Winner-stays produces no natural result — you can play all night and have nothing to show anyone. If the evening needs a winner, count games won per player and read out the top three at the end.

6. King of the court or round robin?

They solve different problems, and the choice comes down to whether people are arriving on a schedule or arriving whenever.

7. Run it without the clipboard

Winner-stays needs someone tracking who is next, and that person stops playing properly the moment they take the job on. The free DillDraw draw tool holds the queue for you: it shuffles everyone into a line at the start, keeps the winning side on court as the reigning pair, sends the losers to the back, and pulls the next challengers off the front as each court frees up. Run up to eight courts at once, each with its own king, and standings build themselves from the scores you tap in.

Two things it deliberately does not do, so you know before you start: it keeps the winning pair together rather than splitting them, and it does not enforce a three-win cap — if you want the king retired, step them off and they rejoin the queue at the back.

Frequently asked questions

Wait times assume doubles, one court, and roughly eight minutes a game; the queue-depth figures come from the two-in, two-out rotation described above. For a format where everyone plays the same number of games instead, see the free printable round robin charts.