Americano is useful when you want several short games and a session-wide table. In FOM Play it can use rotating partners or fixed pairs, so decide first whether the unit you want to rank is each player or each team.
What makes Americano work
With Rotating partners, each player receives the result recorded for their team in that round and appears as an individual row. With Fix Partner, the pair stays together and the standings use one row per team. You can rank either setup by Matches Won or Points Won.
For Rotating sessions, the Americano scheduler balances how often people play, then applies penalties to repeated partners and opponents when choosing later pairings. It prioritizes variety; it does not guarantee that every possible partnership will occur in a finite number of rounds.
Setting it up
- Start a match and choose Americano.
- Choose Rotating for individual standings or Fix Partner for team standings.
- Add at least four players. Fix Partner needs an even roster with every player assigned to a pair.
- Set courts, rounds, and the target total points for each game. The setup starts at 21 points, but the host can change it.
- Choose whether the table prioritizes matches won or points won, review the setup, and generate the match.
A few tips
- Match court capacity to the roster. Each active court needs four players. Anyone outside the available slots receives a bye for that round.
- Treat bye rotation as a balancing goal, not a promise. The scheduler first favors players with fewer appearances and randomizes ties, so short sessions can still end with small differences.
- Use enough rounds for the variety you want. More rounds create more opportunities for different pairings; they do not make an individual result independent of every partner.
- Make Toxic Mode consensual. It is optional and can be adjusted during an active match; official standings stay separate.
When to pick something else
Choose Mexicano when you want each next round to react to the current standings. Choose Match Play when you want tennis-style 0–15–30–40 game scoring. If you mainly want a pre-planned set of point-based rounds, Americano is the clearest fit — then use the partner mode and ranking criterion to define what “winning the night” means.
