Professional and amateur play at the PPA Newport Beach Doubles Shootout. Photo: Bryceppa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The short answer: A best-of-five final (games to 11, 11, 11, 11, then 15) is not a long best-of-three. It is a different match. Losing the first game matters less than you think: in half of the ten five-game finals the PPA itself ranks among its best since 2022, the eventual champions lost the opening game, and in three of them they lost the first two. (Those fifth games were played to 11; the current format described by LetsPickleball plays the decider to 15.) What wins these matches is budgeting: your two timeouts, your legs, your challenges and your patterns, across what may be two and a half hours. All three doubles finals at the World Championships in Dallas next Sunday will be played this way.
On the final Sunday of the 2025 Rate Vegas Cup, Christian Alshon and Andrei Daescu had a game point in one game and a match point in another. They won neither game, and lost the match. Ben Johns and Gabriel Tardio beat them 12-10, 9-11, 11-7, 4-11, 12-10 in a men’s doubles final that lasted about two hours and 28 minutes, according to pickleball.com. The PPA’s own statisticians said a team holding a game point and a match point in different games of a final and losing both had never happened in any PPA final since at least the start of 2022.
Look at the fourth game: 4-11. Johns and Tardio, with a 2-1 lead, lost that game badly, and then won the fifth 12-10. That is the whole lesson of the best-of-five in one scoreline. A heavy loss in game four is not a collapse. Sometimes it is a choice.
The format, and the rules that change with it
On the PPA Tour, most professional matches are best of three games to 11, win by two, with side-out scoring. On Championship Sunday some finals switch to best of five. LetsPickleball’s rules guide gives the format as four games to 11 and a deciding fifth to 15. At the 2026 World Championships, all three doubles finals will be best of five.
Several rules interact with that length. According to LetsPickleball’s comparison of the 2025 professional rules, PPA pros get two timeouts per match, not per game, plus any television timeouts. They get two video challenges per match, keep a challenge if it is correct, and gain an extra one in a third or fifth game. There is a 60-second break between games, and the tour piloted on-court coaching between points in 2025. Players should check the current PPA pro rules before the event, because the details change, but the principle holds: your resources are fixed while the match grows longer.
Two timeouts across a best of three is a reasonable allowance. Two timeouts across five games, one of them to 15, is scarce. Treat them as such.
What the best five-game finals tell us
The PPA published a list of what it considers the ten outstanding five-game finals since the start of 2022. It is a curated list rather than a complete data set, so read the numbers with care. Still, WPM went through the scorelines.
- In five of the ten, the eventual winners lost the first game.
- In three of the ten, they lost the first two games and came back: Lacy Schneemann and Tyson McGuffin at the 2025 Australia Open (8-11, 6-11, then three wins), the Johns brothers at the 2023 PPA Championships (7-11, 3-11, then three wins), and James Ignatowich and McGuffin at the 2023 Tournament of Champions (5-11, 4-11, then 11-0 in game three).
- Every one of those fifth games was played to 11, win by two, and three went beyond 11: 12-10 in Las Vegas in 2025 and 2024, and 13-11 at Red Rock in 2023, where Brendon Long and McGuffin saved match points at 10-7-2 and 11-10-2.
Selection bias is obvious: the PPA picked memorable matches, and comebacks are memorable. But the pattern matches what a coach would tell you. In a best-of-three, losing game one leaves no room for error. In a best-of-five, it is information.
Phase one: games one and two, the scouting games
The first two games are where you find out what is true today, rather than what was true on the scouting video. Which opponent is serving deep? Who is resetting comfortably, and who is speeding up too early? Whose backhand is late after an hour in the sun?
The practical advice is simple. Play your highest-percentage patterns and collect data. Don’t spend a timeout in game one unless the opponent has a run of four or more points. Look at what happened in the 2023 PPA Championships final: Dylan Frazier and JW Johnson led two games to love and were serving at 6-6-1 in game three with a chance to sweep. Ben and Collin Johns won from there. The Johns brothers did not panic in games one and two. They were learning.
Above all, do not change partners’ sides or your whole game plan after one lost game. Change one thing at a time, so you can tell what worked.
Phase two: games three and four, the pivot
Game three is the most important game of a best-of-five that is level at 1-1. The winner needs one more game from two attempts; the loser needs two in a row. If you are going to use a timeout before the fifth game, use it here, in a close game three, when a run of points against you starts.
Game four is where a team leading 2-1 has to decide something. It can go all out to finish the match, or, if its legs are going and the game is getting away early, it can accept a loss and save energy for a fifth game to 15. The 4-11 game in the 2025 Vegas final is an example of a heavily lost fourth game that did not stop the winners. Teams rarely say whether they did it on purpose, and you should not assume they did. But the option exists, and the best teams know it.
The trailing team has the opposite job in game four. It has to win, so this is the game to spend aggression, to target the weaker player, and to use the extra challenge if a line call goes against you.
Phase three: game five, a different game
A note on the decider. The PPA’s ten highlighted finals all have fifth games to 11. LetsPickleball’s guide to the current professional format describes a deciding fifth game to 15, which is the format this piece assumes. Confirm it on the day, because it changes how you play. If the fifth game is to 15, the maths of momentum changes. A 4-0 run in a game to 11 is more than a third of the way to winning. In a game to 15 it is just over a quarter. There is more time to come back, and more time to be caught.
Four rules for the decider:
- Start like it is a game to 11. Teams that settle in slowly in a long game often find themselves 2-7 down.
- Keep your last timeout for a run, not for a score. The time to stop the game is when the opponents have won three or four rallies in a row, whatever the score.
- Serve and return deep. After two hours, the third shot gets lazy. A deep return forces a tired opponent to hit one more good shot.
- Remember that leads do not settle anything. Bright and Rachel Rohrabacher trailed 5-2 in the fifth game of the 2024 Milwaukee Open women’s doubles final against the Kawamoto twins, and won 11-7. That fifth game was to 11, but the lesson carries over.
The decider also rewards teams who know how to come from behind. In the 2026 Virginia Beach Open mixed final, a best-of-three, Kate Fahey and Eric Oncins trailed Catherine Parenteau and Riley Newman 2-8 in the deciding game, then won nine of the last ten points to win 11-9, according to The Dink and Pickleball Surge. Side-out scoring means that only the serving team can score, and a team that keeps winning its own serve can stop the other side scoring for a long time.
Fitness, fuel and the 60-second break
A five-game final can last more than two hours, as the Vegas final showed. Most club players have never played that long. If you are entering a five-game final at a club or amateur level, the preparation is not complicated:
- Eat and drink in every between-game break, not just when you feel tired.
- Use the full break to talk through one tactical point with your partner, not five.
- Change your shirt or grip if you need to, but have them ready in advance; the break is short.
- Train for it: at least once before the event, play five games in a row to 11, 11, 11, 11 and 15.
A note for amateurs
Amateur draws rarely use best-of-five. Amateurs at PPA events play under USA Pickleball rules, which differ from the professional rules in several ways, including timeouts, according to the LetsPickleball guide. Check your event’s format before the day. The worst time to learn the timeout rule is when you have just used your last one.
What to watch in Dallas
On Sunday 8 November, watch the timeouts more than the winners. Watch which team spends one in game one, and which team still has one at 10-10 in game five. Watch the fourth game of any match where one side leads 2-1: is the leading team chasing it, or saving itself? And if a team falls 0-2 behind, remember the Johns brothers in Las Vegas in 2023. The match is still almost half unplayed.
Verdict
A best-of-five final rewards the team that plans for five games, rather than the team that plays best for two of them. Play the first two games to learn, the middle two to decide, and the fifth as if every point were match point. Above all, do not waste your timeouts. You only get two, and the match can last two and a half hours.
