An Americano is drawn in rounds, and the habit is to play it in rounds: nobody walks on for the next one until the last court has finished this one. It feels fair and it feels tidy. It also leaves three courts standing empty while the fourth finishes a close game. CourtsOS does something different, and Saturday night at VDP gave us a real evening to measure it against.
Watch it
The two ways of running it
Wait for every court. No match of a round starts until the last match of the round before is finished. Then everyone walks on together, ninety seconds later. At 22:00 the lights go off, finished or not.
Start early. A court starts its next match ninety seconds after its four players are free, without waiting for the other three courts. This is how CourtsOS ran the night. Every match on an Americano is drawn before the round starts, so a court whose match is over already knows its next four. If they are free, it offers them the court. If one of them is still playing, it waits for that one person and nobody else, and it never runs more than one round ahead of the slowest court.
Wait for every court
60
matches finished by 22:00
Four more still on court when the lights went off. 1 hour 24 minutes of court time spent waiting, beyond the handover. Playing all 67 this way would have needed the lights on until 22:20.
Start early · what happened
67
matches finished, every one
Nothing cut off. 34 minutes of court time spent waiting. Last ball at 22:03.
The difference is not that anyone plays faster. The match lengths are identical on both sides. It is that on the waiting side the average round takes as long as its slowest match, every round, and there are seventeen of them.
Who played with whom
Seven extra matches is only worth having if the draw behind them is still a good one, so the video ends with the night itself. Across 67 matches every player had, on average, 7.8 different partners and 15.6 different opponents. Not a single partnership was repeated all night: 102 pairings, 102 different pairs. Of the 325 possible pairs of players, 93 never shared a court - about what you would expect from 26 people and four courts in under three hours.
Then three players' recap cards, exactly as they see them on the results link - points, record, round by round, best moment, toughest test - and the winner's night replayed on the who played who picture: partner line first, then the two opponents, then the score, with earlier lines staying lit until the whole web is there.
How the night was replayed
What is real and what is assumed
- The match lengths are real. CourtsOS stamps the moment each score is submitted, so every match's end is known to the second. A match's start is not stamped; it is taken as the earliest the early-start rule could have offered it - the court free, all four players free, the round before last complete - plus the handover. Whatever the four took to walk on is inside the match's length, on both sides.
- Ninety seconds between matches, on both sides.
- A hard stop at 22:00. On the waiting side a round that is due still starts, and anything on court at 22:00 is cut off and counted as not finished. The real side is shown as it happened: three matches ran a minute or two past the stop.
- “Court time waiting” is idle time beyond the ninety-second handover, added up across the four courts, plus any time after a court's last match.
- One departure. A player left after round 13 and the remaining rounds were redrawn at 21:19, which is why every court on the real side sits idle for two minutes at that point. It is in the data, so it is in the video.
Early start is on by default for Americano and Mixicano events and can be switched off on the Setup tab.
Running something like this?
CourtsOS runs Americanos, cups, leagues and everything in between - on whatever screens your club already has.
Book a demo More event reportsThe replay and the video were built from the event's own archive by CourtsOS. Player names are shortened to initials throughout.