Four minutes, every shot linked to the glossary

How to play Padel: The Game

One tie-break to seven against a pair you choose by PELO, from 800 to 2400. The ball is real, the walls are real, the four players move on their own. Your job is the one decision that matters in padel: which shot, and where. Everything else the game does for you, and tells you about afterwards.

The controls

• Phone: press a shot button where you want the ball to go (left of the button is your left), slide to adjust, lift to play. One touch.
• Mouse: click a shot and the arrow follows the mouse; click again to play. Or press, drag and release in one motion.
• Dash: hold the dash bar under the court, or Shift. Your player runs faster and stretches further for the ball, but it burns stamina three and a half times as fast, and a ball hit at full stretch is less placed. Standing still, you get your breath back.
• Your serve: to the glass, down the T or at the body, from three buttons under the court.
• No decision? The world waits about two seconds from the back, less at the net, then plays a sensible default and marks it as a hesitation.
• Sound is on by default: the racket, the glass and the crowd. The button top right mutes it.

The shots, by where you are

The menu changes with the ball. Each shot is one word in the glossary; the links go to its paragraph.

What the court does

• The back walls are three metres of glass and a metre of mesh above. The side walls are four metres for the first two metres from the back, three after, glass near the back and mesh toward the net. Mesh kills the ball; glass gives it back.
• The door is a metre either side of the net posts. A ball that has bounced and runs out through it is the hitter's point: the door drop, the best point in padel.
• A ball that bounces and then leaves over the fence is por tres or por cuatro: the hitter's point. A ball that hits the glass before it bounces is out.
• The point's line at the end says what decided it, including by how much a ball cleared the fence.

What the players do

• Long rallies: from the seventh shot everyone tires, errors grow a degree a shot on both sides, reactions slow, and the point quickens by up to a fifth.
• Statuses: a pair well behind can turn Optimistic (fewer errors, quicker, sharper, and a tank that empties fast in a long rally) or Hopeless (more errors, slower, tired early); a tight finish can make a pair Anxious (quicker feet, wilder racket). The word sits over their heads and a line beside the score says what it does and for how long. Your partner can get them too; you only very rarely.
• The door duel: a defender standing near the post blocks a door drop two times in three; one caught across the court barely ever. A blocked drop sits up short three times in ten, and then someone has a Finish.
• The crowd grows with the level, from three friends on a bench to a full stand, and stands up when you finish a point.

PELO: one rating for how you decide

PELO is your padel Elo, the way a chess rating works: one number for the quality of your decisions on a court. It moves with the daily Scenario and the Mock Game: a right call against a hard position takes you up, a miss against an easy one takes you down, a hint or a shown call halves the gain. Everyone starts at 1000. Beginners settle around 900, club players around 1300, strong players 1700 and above. It lives on this device; sign in and it follows you everywhere, with everything below.

The pairs, by PELO

Seventeen pairs, one every hundred points from 800 to 2400. Each rung is quicker, reads the ball earlier, misses less, lobs deeper and tires slower than the one below. Beat a pair and the next opens; your own PELO opens every pair up to it, so a 1500 decision-maker can walk straight on against Maya and Luis.

The rungs between are interpolated (900, 1100, 1300 and so on, each with its own pair). From 1500 the pairs think: before they hit, the engine replays their options from their side of the net and they choose the one that wins most, more often the higher the rung. Their execution still carries their error; the tour pairs have almost none.

Your player learns

Your player starts close to nothing. The chiquita, the drive and the lob start at a quarter; every other shot starts at almost nothing, so the first smashes go anywhere and the first víboras find the fence. Each time you play a shot it improves a little, and it is a grind: about 35 plays take a shot from a quarter to half, and a shot is mastered after a few hundred. The legs improve with every game too, a step quicker and a moment earlier to the ball, for about a hundred games. The menu on the game page shows every shot as a bar and your player level from 1 to 50. You can call the right shot from day one; you earn the right to hit it.

Gear, rackets and the look of your player live in the locker with an account; they are drawn on your player in the game and in every Scenario.

The engine

The coach and the strong pairs use the same engine. Before a call it replays every option from the exact moment you have the ball, several times each, three directions each, in a copy of the world with the same physics, and counts how often each one wins the point. Those counts are shrunk toward what professional match analysis says works (net shots make four winners in five; groundstrokes and lobs end points as errors more often than as winners; the off-the-wall smash keeps the point alive three times in four and wins it outright one time in five; every extra shot in a rally costs about four points of win chance), and when two shots are close it looks again at both. The Mock Game review shows you the counts.

The coach, the rating, the badges

• After every point the coach names the call that decided it, in one line, and a tip from a bank of padel truths keyed to what just happened.
• The Mock Games use the same engine: one point, three to five calls, judged as you go, with a rating that moves like chess.com's and a streak.
• Badges are for the firsts: a winner, a víbora, a wall smash, a side-wall smash, five in a row, ten bandejas, ten deep lobs, a level beaten. One card a point.
• Everything lives on this device. One link carries it to another.

Three habits that win here

1. Stand still until the ball is yours; the game moves you to it, and a player who is not running hits cleaner.
2. The bandeja before the smash, always, unless the lob is short and you are inside the box.
3. When they drop you to the door, breathe: the band is wider than it looks.