How to organise a squash tournament

A badminton hall can put six courts side by side and a table tennis venue can put ten tables in a sports hall. A squash club has the number of courts it was built with, each is a sealed box, and nothing about your entry list changes that.

Worse for the planner: the rules place no upper limit on a match. A game continues from 10-all until someone leads by two (WSF 2.2), and a match is the best of five games (2.3). There is no expedite rule, no tiebreak, no hard cap. Two evenly matched retrievers can turn a single game into twenty minutes, and there is nothing the referee may legitimately do about it.

So squash scheduling is not the multiplication problem that table tennis is. It is a problem of expected value plus deliberate slack. Build the schedule on realistic averages, then leave enough air that a long match does not push the whole afternoon sideways.

Add up what the rules require before a single rally is played:

Component	Time	Source
Warm-up on court together	up to 4 min	WSF 4.1
Between warm-up and first serve	up to 1 min	WSF 7.1
Each game at PAR-11, club standard	8–12 min	planning estimate
Between each game	up to 2 min	WSF 7.1
Court turnover between matches	3–5 min	practice

So a 3-0 best of five is roughly 4 + 1 + 30 + 4 = 39 minutes of court time. A 3-2 is 4 + 1 + 50 + 8 = 63 minutes. Add turnover and the honest planning figure is 45 minutes per court per match, with a fat tail you cannot legislate away.

Format	Planning figure	Matches per court per hour
Best of 3 to 11	30 min	2
Best of 5 to 11	45 min	1.3

A four-court club over a seven-hour day gives you about 37 best-of-five matches, or 56 at best of three. Those numbers govern everything else on this page.

WSF 2.3: a match is normally the best of 5 games, but may be the best of 3 games. That sentence is in the rulebook precisely so that events with limited court time have a sanctioned option, and it is the single most useful tool a squash organiser has.

Best of three cuts the planning figure from 45 minutes to 30 — a third off the whole schedule — without any of the compromises that shortened formats involve in other sports. It is not a modified scoring system, not a house rule, not a tiebreak substitute. It is one of the two formats World Squash publishes.

Where to spend the saving:

• Early rounds at best of three, semi-finals and final at best of five. The matches that matter get the full distance and the volume rounds get out of the way.
• Groups at best of three, bracket at best of five. Same idea with a group stage underneath.
• The whole event at best of three when the club has two courts and forty entries, because the alternative is not a longer event, it is a smaller one.

Say which format applies to which round in the entry information. Players plan their day around it, and a best-of-five semi-final that was advertised as best of three is a genuine grievance.

The arithmetic is the same as anywhere else; what differs is the price per match.

Shape	Matches	Court-hours at best of 5	Minimum per entrant
Knockout, 16	15	11	1
Knockout, 16, with consolation round	23	17	2
Knockout, 32	31	23	1
Round robin, 8	28	21	7
4 groups of 4 → knockout of 8	24 + 7 = 31	23	3

On four courts over seven hours you have 28 court-hours. A knockout of 32 at best of five is 23 — it fits, but sends sixteen people home after one match. Four groups of four feeding a knockout of eight is the same 23 court-hours and gives everybody three matches. On the numbers there is no contest.

The consolation round is the cheapest way to fix a straight knockout: JudgeMate builds one extra round for the first-round losers, so a 16 draw goes from fifteen matches to twenty-three and nobody drives home after twenty minutes on court. It is one round, not a full plate.

WSF 3.1: a match should normally be officiated by a Referee, or by a Referee and a Marker. Squash is not a sport where players can sensibly call their own interference: the whole let-and-stroke system exists because a player cannot judge whether they would have made a good return while they are the one who was blocked.

At club level the convention that works is simple and costs nothing: the loser of the previous match on that court referees the next one. It guarantees an official on every court without a rota, it puts someone on the chair who has just been on that court and knows how the ball is bouncing, and it distributes the job evenly.

What to give them before the event starts:

• A one-page reminder of the let, stroke and no let decision tree.
• The conduct ladder in order: Conduct Warning, Conduct Stroke, Conduct Game, Conduct Match (14.7).
• The intervals they enforce: 4 minutes warm-up with the change of sides at 2, one minute to the first serve, two minutes between games, with the calls "15 seconds" and "Time".
• The match's referee link, so the score is on the platform rather than on a scrap of paper.

Pick squash in the creator and set up the draw:

Singles by default. Squash defaults to singles, which is what the discipline says the side is. Doubles squash exists and switching the entry mode to doubles makes the side a pair, which also unlocks the rotation formats.

Points per game and games to win. Set 11 points and 3 games to win for best of five, or 2 for best of three. Since 2 August 2026 the deciding game is played to the same distance as the rest — before that, raising the distance left the decisive game short, which for a best-of-three event meant the match was settled on a different number from the one on the scoreboard.

Courts as resources. Add each court, set the slot to your planning figure — 45 minutes at best of five — and the scheduler lays each round across them. It is worth setting the slot honestly rather than optimistically: a schedule built on 30-minute best-of-five matches is a schedule that will be an hour late by mid-afternoon.

A referee link per match. Hand it to whoever is refereeing that match. Score, game count and the decisive point all land on the public results page as the match is confirmed.