About The Bandeja Lab

Who we are, how it is made, what we got wrong

The Bandeja Lab is padel, gamified. Most points are lost to a decision before they are lost to a shot, and decisions can be trained the way chess players train: a real position, a choice, the reason, a rating that moves. So we made them a game: the morning Scenario, the Mock Game that plays a whole point, and Padel: The Game, which coaches every ball you hit.

We are a few padel players who kept losing the same points and wanted to know why. The bandeja is the shot that decides whether you keep the net; the lab is where we work out the rest. Everything here is made by hand: the court is drawn in code, the puzzles are written one at a time, the game engine was built shot by shot until a smash did what a smash does, and the words are ours. There is no login, no app to install, no video you have to sit through. One position every morning, the reasoning under it, and the games and tools that grew around that habit.

How a puzzle gets written

It starts on a court. Somebody loses a point they think they should have won, or wins one and cannot say why, and it goes in the notebook: who stood where, where the ball was, what was played. Later it gets drawn, four players and a ball, and we argue about the options until there is one call that is right most of the time and two or three that are wrong for reasons worth writing down. Then the reasoning is written three times, once for a beginner, once for a club player, once for somebody who already knows the rule and wants to know when it breaks. If we cannot agree on the answer, the puzzle does not go in. A few have been taken out.

How the game judges you

Padel: The Game and the Mock Games run on the same small engine: a ball with gravity, a court with the right glass and mesh and a door where the door is, four players with speed, reaction and error, and a coach. Before every call of yours the coach plays each option thirty-two times in his head and keeps the win rate. When he tells you the lob was wrong, he is not quoting a rule; he is telling you what happened the thirty-two times he tried it. He has disagreed with us more than once, and he has been right more than once.

What we have got wrong

Plenty, and we write it down. The side fence was three metres all the way along for a week when it should have stood four in the corners. The defenders in the game stopped blocking door drops for a day because of a misplaced brace. A timed quiz that we liked turned out to be a slot machine and was removed. The notebook has the running list, dated, in plain words. If you think a puzzle is wrong, we want to hear it: padel is a young enough sport that plenty is still argued about, and the arguments are the best part. The address is coming; for now, tell the person who sent you the link.

What we will not do

• Make you sign in. Everything works without an account: your streak, your rating and your levels live on your device. Sign in with Google if you want them on every device, or carry them by one link.
• Put the puzzles behind a wall. They are the reason people come back, and we would rather have the people.
• Let a shop change a ranking. The racket finder earns a small commission when you buy through its links, and the order of the rackets never knows that.
• Publish a rule we have not checked against the federation's text, or a tactic we have not seen work on a court.

Put today's Scenario on your site

Clubs, coaches and padel blogs can embed the daily Scenario. It plays in place, turns over at six in the morning Madrid time on its own, and links back here. Paste this where you want it:

<iframe src="https://thebandejalab.com/embed/" title="The Bandeja Lab: today's padel puzzle" width="100%" height="820" style="border:0;max-width:960px" loading="lazy"></iframe>

For your club's name on a band in your colour, add both to the address, the colour as a hex code: /embed/?club=Your+Club&c=0a7d4f.

Coaches: this week's seven puzzles as a printable sheet, with the answer key on the last page. Clubs: the tournament maker is yours to run an Americano with, no account, and the rounds sheet prints. Brands and clubs can put their name on the net the game is played over: sponsor the court.

The desk

A static site, built with one script and no framework, hosted on Cloudflare. The pixel players were drawn a pixel at a time and the crowd sounds are real recordings crushed to eight bits so they fit the court. The only code on these pages that we did not write ourselves belongs to the ad slot and the font. Everything else, including this sentence, was typed by somebody who had a match that evening.