Which squash format should your event use?

Table tennis permits any odd number of games. Badminton publishes three sanctioned distances. Squash gives you one sentence: WSF 2.3 — a match is normally the best of 5 games, but may be the best of 3 games.

That is the entire format licence, and it is worth appreciating how much it constrains things. There is no shortened game, no tiebreak variant, no sanctioned equivalent of a super tiebreak or a 15-point set. The game is fixed by 2.2: each game is played to 11 points, except that if the score reaches 10-all, the game continues until one player leads by two.

Format	Games to win	Planning figure	When it fits
Best of 3	2	30 min	Group stages, early rounds, two-court clubs, box leagues
Best of 5	3	45 min	The standard, and what finals should be

Both are published formats. Neither needs an apology in the entry information.

The thing that separates squash from every neighbour is what the rules do not contain. There is no expedite system as in table tennis, no hard cap as in badminton's 30, no tiebreak as in tennis. From 10-all a game runs until someone leads by two, and that is the end of the rulebook's involvement.

In practice this means a squash schedule has a much fatter tail than the equivalent in another sport. A 3-0 best of five is about 39 minutes of court time; a 3-2 with two long games is over an hour. The averages are fine and the tail is what wrecks an afternoon.

Two consequences worth building into the plan:

• Plan on 45 minutes and mean it. A schedule built on an optimistic 35 will be an hour behind by mid-afternoon, and there is no mechanism in the rules to claw it back.
• Put the slack where the long matches are. Semi-finals and finals between evenly matched players are exactly where the fat tail lives. Leave a gap after them, not before them.

Squash used hand-in, hand-out scoring — often called English scoring — until the professional game moved to point-a-rally and the amateur game followed. Under it, only the server could score. A rally won by the receiver produced no point, just the serve.

That is worth knowing for one reason: it is the historical answer to why squash has no time rule. Under hand-in, hand-out, a game to 9 could last five minutes or forty-five depending on how many rallies passed with no score, and the sport lived with that unpredictability for decades. Point-a-rally scoring was itself the fix. Every rally now produces a point, so a game has a floor on how fast it can move, and the game to 11 has a much tighter distribution than the game to 9 ever did.

So when a modern schedule still needs slack, it is not because the scoring is loose. It is because the two-clear rule at 10-all is deliberately open-ended, and the sport decided that is a fair price for not ending a game on a single point.

JudgeMate offers 11, 15, 21 or 25 points per game across its set-based sports, and squash inherits that list. Only 11 is a World Squash format. If you set 15, you are running a house format, and this guide will not dress it up as anything else.

What changed on 2 August 2026 is that the longer distances now behave consistently. Before that, raising the distance left the deciding game at 11 while every other game went to the new number — so a best-of-three event set to 15 was decided by a game to 11, on a scoreboard that said 15. The decider now follows the distance you set.

Points per game	Games to win	What you get
11	3	Best of five, the WSF standard
11	2	Best of three, also WSF
11	1	A single game — fine for a club night, not a WSF format
15, 21, 25	any	House formats, coherent but not sanctioned

For anything with a title attached, stay on 11.

The shapes are the same everywhere; squash just pays more per match than any other racket sport.

Shape	Matches	Court-hours at best of 5	Court-hours at best of 3
Knockout, 16	15	11.3	7.5
Knockout, 32	31	23.3	15.5
Knockout 16 + consolation round	23	17.3	11.5
Round robin, 8	28	21	14
4 groups of 4 → knockout of 8	31	23.3	15.5
6 groups of 4 → knockout of 8	43	32.3	21.5

Read the last two columns as the real choice. Four groups of four feeding a knockout of eight costs the same as a straight knockout of 32 and gives everybody three matches instead of giving half the field one. At best of three in the groups and best of five in the bracket, the same shape costs about 17 court-hours — the best value on the table.

Mixing lengths across rounds is the standard move, and unlike some sports there is no rule against it. Groups at best of three, quarter-finals at best of three, semis and final at best of five is a shape that fits four courts into a single day and still gives the final its proper distance.

If you have	And you want	Use
2 courts, one evening, 8 entries	A winner tonight	Knockout of 8, best of 3
3 courts, one day, 24 entries	Everyone to play properly	6 groups of 4 at best of 3, knockout of 8
4 courts, one day, 32 entries	A real championship	8 groups of 4 at best of 3, knockout of 16 at best of 5
2 courts, a month	An ongoing club ladder	Box leagues, best of 3, self-scheduled

The last row is the one most squash clubs actually need, and it is a different shape from a tournament: not a day, but a rolling structure over weeks. That is the subject of its own guide.