Side-Out Scoring Is a Blowout Machine. Stop Reading 11-2 as a Verdict.
Here’s how men’s singles went over the last two weeks.
At the Las Vegas Open, Hunter Johnson beat Roscoe Bellamy on his way to the title. A week later at the Chicago Cup, Bellamy beat top seed Chris Haworth 11-4, 11-5 in the final. In the semifinal right before that, Haworth had beaten Emilien Burnel 11-1, 11-0. And Burnel, a French qualifier who came in as the No. 55 seed, had opened his tournament by knocking out Hunter Johnson (The Dink has the full Chicago recap).
So Johnson beat Bellamy, who crushed Haworth, who crushed Burnel, who beat Johnson. Pro pickleball has accidentally invented four-player rock-paper-scissors.
It gets better. In Vegas, No. 14 seed Luc Pham knocked out Haworth 4-11, 11-7, 11-8 in the round of 16, then scored one point in two games against John Lucian Goins in the quarterfinal. Johnson then beat Ben Johns in the final, 11-1, 11-3.
If you read a score as a measurement of how much better one player is, none of this makes sense. But side-out scoring, the format the PPA plays and the one your Tuesday group plays, hands out blowouts to evenly matched players all the time. We ran the numbers to find out how often.
Two identical players, 200,000 games
Two players, each wins exactly half the rallies. No momentum, no fatigue, no nerves, no serving advantage. Side-out scoring, game to 11, win by 2. We had a computer play it 200,000 times, which is a normal thing to do on a Sunday. Here’s what the scoreboard looked like:
- The median margin was 4 points. The typical game between exact equals ends 11-7, not 11-9.
- 18% of games ended with the loser on 3 points or fewer. That’s roughly one game in five or six that looks like a beatdown.
- About 5% ended 11-1 or 11-0. One game in twenty.
- 79% of games had a run of five or more unanswered points, and 57% had a run of six or more. Again, there’s no momentum anywhere in this model.
- In best-of-three matches, 39% included at least one game where the loser scored 3 or fewer.
Same two players under rally scoring to 11? A 3-or-fewer game showed up about 6% of the time, and 11-1 or worse almost never (0.6%).
The reason is that side-out scoring only lets the server score. While you’re receiving, your number is frozen, and the rally that stops a run earns you the serve and zero points. So the score climbs in staircases: a run for one side, a flat stretch, a run for the other. Rally scoring moves the score every rally, so it zigzags. Staircases make big margins.
Making servers win only 40% of rallies, which cuts runs short, still left about 14% of games at 3 or fewer. A doubles version with two servers per side came out nearly identical. The machine runs either way.
So was the 11-1 final a fluke?
Probably not, and this is the useful part. The math tells you how much noise to expect, so you can spot the scores that are too lopsided to be noise.
Haworth’s nine total points in the Chicago final? Between equal players, a straight-games loss that ugly happens about 11% of the time. Unusual, not shocking, and the score alone can’t tell you whether Bellamy was better that Sunday or the rallies just clumped his way.
Johnson’s 11-1, 11-3 over Johns is different. Four total points in two games happens about 1% of the time between equals, so that one probably reflects a real gap on the day. Johns came in as the No. 19 seed (Johnson was No. 3), and he’d also played and lost the men’s doubles and mixed finals that weekend. The two 11-1, 11-0 results are rarer still, and it’s no surprise they came against a qualifier and a No. 14 seed fresh off a three-game upset.
Now look at how the upsets themselves went. Pham beat Haworth 4-11, 11-7, 11-8. Burnel beat Johnson 13-11, 5-11, 11-9. Those are coin-flip matches, and side-out scoring lets a slight underdog win plenty of them. A player who wins 48% of rallies still takes about a third of best-of-three matches.
The same math explains why women’s singles looks nothing like this. Men’s singles has had eight different winners in 29 tournaments since January 2025. Over roughly the same stretch, Anna Leigh Waters didn’t lose a singles match on tour, and she came into this season at 210-8 for her career. Side-out scoring makes whatever edge actually exists look bigger:
| Your share of rallies | Games you win | Best-of-3 matches you win |
|---|---|---|
| 50% | 50% | 50% |
| 52% | 61% | 66% |
| 55% | 75% | 84% |
| 58% | 86% | 95% |
| 60% | 91% | 98% |
A 210-8 record sits around the 58-59% line. Waters doesn’t need to win every rally. She needs something like 29 rallies out of every 50 instead of 25, and the format turns that into a streak measured in years. The top men are much closer together than that, so the same format turns their small day-to-day swings into upsets that point in every direction.
What this means for your Tuesday 11-3
Play it again before you rebuild anything
You lost 11-3 to a team you usually split with. The urge is to decide your third shot is broken, your partner is washed, and your paddle is dead. But our identical players lost by 8 or more about once every five or six games. If you lose 11-3 and then 11-8, you’re about even with that team and the first game was a bad draw. Two lopsided losses in a row is where the real conversation starts.
Your return is the brake pedal
Every run in side-out scoring happens while the other side is serving, and every run ends the same way: you win one rally. So when they’re rolling, the return has one job, which is to go in. Deep, middle, plenty of net clearance. This is the worst possible moment for the line-painting return you’ve hit twice in your life.
Don’t call a timeout for “momentum”
Our simulated players had zero momentum, and four out of five games still had a five-point run. A lot of what feels like momentum is random rallies clumping together. A timeout earns its keep when you’ve spotted a pattern: they’re hammering your partner’s backhand, you’ve dumped the same reset three times, nobody’s covering the middle. Calling one because “they’re on a roll” mostly gives the run a chance to end on its own, which it was going to do anyway.
8-2 isn’t over
The run math cuts both ways. Between equal players, the side trailing 2-8 came back to win about one time in ten under side-out scoring. That’s closer to one in nine if the trailing side has the serve and one in thirteen if it doesn’t. Under rally scoring it was about one in thirty. Your lead is real, but in this format it buys you less than it looks like. Keep playing the way that got you to 8. (If your group plays rally scoring, leads are sturdier and errors cost more. Different game.)
Chase small edges
Here’s the good news hiding in that table. Going from 50% of rallies to 55% means winning one extra rally out of every 20, and under side-out scoring that turns a coin flip into winning three games out of four. You don’t need a new paddle for that. You need one fewer missed return, or one fewer third shot in the net, or one fewer speedup off a ball below the tape, every 20 rallies.
Don’t sweat the scoreline in your rating
DUPR has counted game scores, not just wins, since 2025, and its Impact tool now lets you preview how an 11-2 win would move your number compared to an 11-9 win. Over dozens of matches, margins carry real information. A single scoreline carries a lot of luck, so worrying about winning “by enough” in a Tuesday round robin is optimizing noise. Win more rallies and the number will follow.
The scoreboard exaggerates
The score tells you who won. The margin tells you much less than it seems to, because side-out scoring hands out blowouts to evenly matched players about once every five or six games. Save your conclusions for the truly absurd ones, like 11-1, 11-0, and for patterns that hold up across several games.
So the four-player loop isn’t a sign that men’s singles is broken. It’s a handful of close three-gamers that went the underdog’s way, plus a few scorelines that look worse than the gap behind them. And when your Tuesday group beats you 11-2, play them again before you decide anything about your game. The next game is a fresh draw.
