How to Use Mostly Perfect Pickleball
Set up a format, generate a court schedule, keep scores, and share the results—all from your browser. This guide covers the less-obvious setup and session details.
Choose a format and start
From the home screen, choose the kind of play you want to organize. Add the players or teams, choose available courts and game settings, then review the setup. Tap Start to generate the schedule using the final roster and lineup order.
Pick the format that fits your group
- Singles Round Robin: players compete one-on-one. Choose it for individual standings and head-to-head singles games.
- Doubles Scramble: players rotate partners across scheduled games. Choose it when the group wants mixed partnerships and individual player standings.
- Fixed Partners: enter teams that stay together throughout the session; teams rotate opponents.
- Season: plan recurring play dates with player availability, season-wide standings, and a mini round robin for each date.
- King of Court (KOC): use a doubles ladder rather than a conventional round robin. On each round, winners move up and split, while losing teams move down and split; waiting players enter at the lowest court. KOC requires at least eight players to play and pauses if fewer than eight remain.
Round robin or KOC? Round robin formats aim to distribute scheduled pairings across a session. KOC is a court-movement ladder driven by the previous round’s results; it is not a round-robin schedule.
Set up players and standings
On any name-entry screen, use these tools to finish the roster before starting.
Import from History
Tap the History chip beside the section heading to see real player names from past sessions. Generic names such as “Player 1” are filtered out. Choose names in the order you want them added; numbered badges show which slots they will fill. Tap Add N Players to place them into the available slots from top to bottom.
Drag to reorder
Use the grip handle on a player row to move that player up or down before the session starts. In Fixed Partners, drag the team-card handle to move both partners together.
Choose a tiebreaker order
On setup step 2, open Advanced to select how tied players are separated. Win percentage remains first; reorder point differential, points scored, points allowed, and head-to-head criteria. Best-of-3 sessions also offer game win percentage. The chosen order is saved with that session.
Importing and reordering change the starting roster, not an already-generated schedule. The schedule is created when you tap Start, using the final name order. Schedule balance is best-effort; it is not a guarantee of perfect equity, especially after roster changes.
Home court and serve order
“Home” in a matchup means which side serves first. It does not affect scoring or standings. In doubles, the first two listed players begin on serve.
MPP tracks serve-first appearances and tries to give the next home assignment to the team with fewer appearances. This is a best-effort balancing rule, not a promise that every player’s count will differ by no more than one by the end.
Serving first can offer a positional advantage at the start of a game. Home/away balancing is intended to distribute that advantage across a session.
Game rules
Choose the scoring rules during session setup. They apply to every game and are locked once the session starts.
- Sideout scoring: only the serving team scores a point. If the receiving team wins a rally, it earns the serve rather than a point.
- Rally scoring: every rally awards a point to the winner, regardless of who served. It can make games quicker at the same target score.
- Points to win: set a target from 7 to 21; the default is 11.
- Win by 2: after reaching the target, a player or team must lead by two to win (standard pickleball).
- Win by 1: reaching the target ends the game immediately, without a deuce.
The selected rules are shown in the session header and on court cards as a reminder. You cannot change the rules mid-session.
Time estimates
Setup may show totals such as 9m ~ 31m Total. These estimate the full session length if each game takes 9, 12, or 15 minutes, respectively. They are planning references, not a schedule constraint.
MPP supports optional timed-game rules, but it does not run a countdown clock. Use an external timer to track elapsed time.
Enter and edit scores
Enter a result from its game or court card. If you make a mistake, tap the completed game row in the Schedule tab to reopen score entry and correct it. Standings recalculate automatically when a score changes.
A score correction updates the standings for you; there is no need to recalculate them manually.
Finalize a session
When scores are complete—or you are done for the day—tap Finalize Session to close the session. You can also finalize early, for example when a round is skipped; any partial scores remain as entered.
- Scores are locked against accidental edits.
- Any active live session ends, and live viewers see the final standings.
- The session becomes available as a shareable results snapshot.
Understand standings
By default, standings rank players by wins, then point differential. A custom tiebreaker order selected in setup can add other criteria after the first ranking criterion.
- Wins: more wins ranks higher.
- Point differential: the total of your score minus your opponents’ scores across all games. For example, an 11–9 win adds 2; a 9–11 loss subtracts 2.
Point differential separates players tied on wins and rewards scoring consistently even when win counts are equal.
Sessions and seasons
Saved sessions
MPP saves sessions locally on your device, so you can keep multiple sessions for different groups or days and switch between them. Use Past Sessions on the home screen to find them. Sessions are not deleted automatically; remove one from the list when you no longer need it.
Session data lives in this browser’s local storage. Clearing browser data or changing browsers can remove locally saved sessions.
Changing a roster after play starts
Only the session creator can add or remove players, and this is supported for Doubles Scramble, Singles, and King of Court—not Fixed Partners. Played games and scores are preserved. Future pairings adapt to played history; in Scramble, equal-count replacements inherit outgoing players’ future slots. Roster changes can reduce partner and opponent balance, so future schedule equity is best-effort.
Season dates and sharing
Seasons support recurring play dates, player availability, season-wide standings, and a mini round robin for each meetup. Season sharing uses a longer inactivity window: a season share closes after 180 days without activity, compared with 60 minutes for a standard live session. A new saved update resets the inactivity window.