The short answer: Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin beat the top seeds, Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio, 11-6, 11-8 in the Hong Kong Slam final on 25 October, and won all ten games they played that week. They are the defending world champions and have won two of their last three events together. Johns and Tardio won all nine events they entered together in the first half of the season, but they have now lost two finals in three weeks. Going into Dallas (2–8 November), I’d make Staksrud and Patriquin narrow favourites.
The final was a rematch, and the people who stage these things were aware of it. In April the MB Hanoi Cup opened the PPA Tour Asia season with Johns and Tardio beating Staksrud and Patriquin for the title. At Kai Tak Arena the result went the other way, and it wasn’t close. PPA Tour Asia’s report had it as “Patriquin’s hands were the difference, with Staksrud controlling the tempo, finding holes and rallying the Hong Kong fans behind the duo.”
Afterwards Staksrud was careful not to overclaim. “It was a great tournament for us,” he said afterwards, as quoted by Times Now. “We didn’t play together for the first half of the year, and in the second half we’re just getting started. It’s the second month of us playing together again, and we just want to get better and better and compete against the best guys.”
Two months. That’s the number worth keeping in your head. The team they beat had been together all season.
Every year men’s doubles produces a team everyone agrees is unbeatable, and every year everyone is surprised when somebody beats them. The conventional view now is that Johns and Tardio are still the best team in the world and Hong Kong was an off day. Half of that is right.
A quick word on the method
Scores are from the official PPA Tour Asia results feed for Hong Kong, results to 25 October 2026. Partnership histories are from match reports in Dink Authority Magazine, The Dink and PPA Tour Asia, each linked where it’s quoted. The game and points counts are mine. One tournament is five matches, so the Hong Kong figures are a snapshot, not a trend.
How good was Hong Kong?
As good as a doubles week gets. Seeded second, Staksrud and Patriquin beat Lin and Dustin Wang 11-2, 11-5, Stirling and Wild 11-6, 11-4, Quan Do and Hien Truong 11-4, 11-2, Connor Garnett and Dylan Frazier 11-9, 11-1, and then the No. 1 seeds. That’s five matches, ten games and 47 points conceded, or under five a game. Only two opponents reached eight points in any game: Garnett and Frazier in that 11-9 opener, and Johns and Tardio in the second game of the final.
So the best team in the draw managed eight points in a game against them, and that was their high-water mark. You’d expect a final between the top two seeds to be the tightest match of the week. It was among the most comfortable.
Why did they split up in the first place?
Because, at the time, it looked like the sensible thing to do.
They’re no new act. Dink Authority Magazine traces the partnership to June 2024 in Sacramento, where they beat JW Johnson and Dylan Frazier 11-7, 11-7, 11-0. That was also Patriquin’s first PPA title. In Virginia Beach that year they came from 3-9 down in the fourth game against Ben and Collin Johns and closed the match on a run of 16 near-consecutive points. They won the 2024 season finale, and in November 2025 they won the World Championships in Dallas, beating JW Johnson and CJ Klinger in the final. According to Zane Navratil, the pro and analyst whose YouTube breakdown The Dink wrote up in September, they reached five finals together in 2025 and “were clearly the second best team in the game during that stretch.”
Second best. That’s what broke them up. Going into 2026 Patriquin teamed up with Christian Alshon and Staksrud with Andrei Daescu, and both new teams ran into the same wall. In the first half of the season Johns and Tardio, by Navratil’s count, went “a perfect 9 for 9” in events they entered together, and the top four teams took 24 of the 27 medals available. “When a duo goes 9 for 9 in tournaments, second place stops feeling acceptable,” The Dink’s write-up said. That’s a fair summary of every partner change in professional sport, and of most divorces.
The reshuffle that followed was more of a round of musical chairs than a rebuild. Staksrud and Patriquin got back together. Alshon and Daescu did too. Patriquin and Tardio won the Brisbane title together, beating Tama Shimabukuro and JW Johnson 3-11, 11-6, 11-7, which means the man who beat Tardio in Hong Kong had been his partner the week before. When Patriquin was absent in Arizona, Staksrud played alongside Johns. At the top of this sport, your partner and your opponent can swap places in a week.
Navratil was sceptical of the reunion. “Reverting to what worked before doesn’t answer the question of how you actually beat the best team in the world,” he argued. “It just makes you comfortable again.” It was a reasonable view in September. By late October it looked wrong.
Did Johns and Tardio get worse, or did everyone else get better?
Mostly the second, and the distinction matters for Dallas.
The first-half record isn’t in doubt, and nine from nine is about as dominant as doubles gets. But the second half hasn’t gone the same way. On 4 October at the Las Vegas Open, Johns went home with three silver medals. According to Dink Authority, that ended his run of 58 consecutive PPA tournaments with at least one title. Alshon and Daescu, the other reunited pair, won the men’s doubles there after beating Staksrud and Patriquin in the semi-final. A week later in Chicago, Johns went out in the round of 32, and Staksrud and Patriquin won the title, 11-1, 11-6 over Jaume Martínez Vich and Nico Acevedo. It was their fifth title together. Then Hong Kong.
Look at the pattern. Johns and Tardio haven’t stopped reaching finals; they’ve stopped winning them. The two finals they’ve lost were to the two reunited teams, the ones built specifically to beat them. Results have caught up with a team that is still very good. What’s gone is the assumption that they always win, and in doubles that assumption is worth a point or two a game.
The coaching suggests this was planned rather than accidental. Juan Manuel Benítez, a Colombian former professional tennis player and two-time All-American at Baylor, coaches both Patriquin and Staksrud, and was beside them in the Chicago trophy photos. Dink Authority notes that on social media he is already being called “coach of the year”. His own line, from the magazine’s earlier cover interview, is: “I’m not good at doing things halfway.” It’s hard to read the past two months as half a job.
So who is the team to beat?
Staksrud and Patriquin, narrowly. The PPA’s Worlds event page lists them as defending champions in men’s doubles, and Staksrud as the defending men’s singles champion. In their last three events together they’ve won two titles and reached a semi-final. In Hong Kong they beat the No. 1 seeds without dropping a game.
The counter-argument is strong, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Johns and Tardio’s sample is a season; Staksrud and Patriquin’s reunion is two months and a handful of events. On a full year’s evidence, the No. 1 seeds are still the better team. The Dallas draw hadn’t been published on the PPA’s event page as of 26 October, and a seeding that put the two teams in the same half would turn a final into a semi-final. There’s also the schedule: the MLP Nations Cup runs at the same venue, Brookhaven Country Club, from 30 October to 1 November, two days before Worlds begins.
What decides it is direction, not reputation. Worlds is a seven-day PPA major, worth 3,000 ranking points per title, with a total payout of $1,648,641. The finals are on 8 November. One team arrives on a winning run with the title it’s defending. The other arrives having lost two of its last three finals.
The verdict
Staksrud and Patriquin are the team to beat. Johns and Tardio are the team most likely to beat them, which is a sentence nobody would have written in August. For Johns and Tardio, Dallas is the first event of the season that could actually redefine them. Win it, and the autumn becomes a blip. Lose another final, and it’s a trend.
Navratil said going back to an old partner just makes you comfortable again. Two months on, the team that looks comfortable is the one wearing the gold medals.
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine, published by World Pickleball Media Ltd. He follows the global game closely, reporting on news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball…
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