A classic padel tournament with multiple levels has an annoying problem: it's socially dead. Level 9 plays in the morning and heads home. Level 7/8 shows up at 11am and sees nobody else. Level 6 kicks off at 1pm just as the bar is quieting down. Everyone has had their own individual tournament, and nobody has had a day together.
The sequential time-block format is logistically tidy, but it misses the most important thing: that club feeling. Senna from Silva's Padel put it in a message last week: "With sequential you stand around for 4 hours. With parallel you need 6 courts I don't have. I want something in between." That's where Festival Format came from.
The idea in one sentence
Festival Format is a new tournament mode for multi-level events where the sections take turns on shared courts following a rotation. Each level gets a 15-minute round across all courts, then it's the next level's turn, and once the rotation is complete, cycle 2 begins.
A concrete example
Say you have an event on Sunday 30 August, 9am to 2pm, 4 padel courts, three levels (9, 7/8, and 6 and below), each with 10 pairs split across 2 groups.
The Festival schedule looks like this:
- 09:00 – 09:15: Level 9 plays round 1 on all 4 courts
- 09:15 – 09:30: Level 7/8 plays round 1, level 9 takes a break
- 09:30 – 09:45: Level 6 and below plays round 1, the others rest
- 09:45 – 10:00: Back to level 9, now round 2
- ...
Every player has something to do again every 30 minutes, with 30 minutes of rest between rounds. During that break they watch the other levels, grab a drink, and mingle with players from a different level.
