The Top Pickleball Tour’s third stop opened with men’s singles only. Alberto Horcajuelo, Daniel Vega and Jorge Rodríguez went through Friday unbeaten, and Almería’s 4.5 singles winner is not entered, so Sunday brings a different champion. Saturday has 100 doubles matches.
Friday at Club Deportivo Somontes was a singles night, and only a men’s singles night. Forty-eight matches, all of them men’s, from four in the afternoon to the quarter-finals at half past nine. By the end, three men had won everything put in front of them, and a fourth had won a match the group tables said he should lose.
This is the third stop of the Top Pickleball Tour, the circuit that launched from Madrid in August as “powered by APP”, with ranking points from the Association of Pickleball Players and a ranking system built with DUPR. It is not a professional tour in the way the APP’s own events are. The levels are 3.5 and 4.5, the categories are by age as well as standard, and the €5,000 pot is spread across the lot. The 4.5 singles winner takes €250, the runner-up €150. But the circuit’s previous stop, in Almería last month, finished with its 4.5 singles final on the centre court and in the national sports press, and that is the title that matters here.
Pep Canyadell won it, beating José Enrique de la Torre in two games. Neither is among the 18 men entered in Madrid, so the tour will have a different 4.5 singles winner on Sunday from the one it crowned last month.
Horcajuelo, Vega and Rodríguez
Alberto Horcajuelo was the most emphatic of the three. He won his four group matches 21–4, 21–4, 21–10 and 21–18, then beat Samuel Herrera 21–17 in the quarter-final. Five matches, 53 points conceded, which is about ten a match and a fair summary of his evening.
Daniel Vega also won five, but had to live closer to the edge. He beat David Vian 22–21 in the group, the kind of score that tells you a match could have gone either way and leaves no record of how. Otherwise he was comfortable, including 21–11 over Manu Gómez in the quarter-final.
Jorge Rodríguez played one match fewer, in a four-man group, and won all four: 21–12, 21–18 and 21–13 in the group, then 21–12 over Pedro Díaz in the last eight.
The fourth story is Carlos Alcalde. Rodríguez beat him 21–13 in their group, which put Alcalde second and into a quarter-final against Miguel López, who had won his own group without a defeat. Alcalde won it 22–20. He plays Vega in Sunday’s semi-final at 09:30, with Horcajuelo against Rodríguez alongside. If the semis go Horcajuelo’s and Alcalde’s way, the final will be a man who conceded ten points a match against a man who has already lost once this weekend.
At 3.5, which is not in the prize table, Miguel Reina and Miguel Alonso both won their groups 3–0. Reina meets Javier García in Sunday’s semi-finals, and Alonso plays Fernando Sarrasin.
What the entry lists say
The tour’s published entry lists carry fewer than a hundred different names across singles and doubles; local coverage has put the field at 125. No women’s singles draw appears on the official schedule, although the tour’s rules offer the event. Two doubles draws, a four-pair mixed group and the four-pair women’s over-40s, fall short of the five-entry minimum in those same rules and are being played anyway as single groups.
Saturday: 100 matches
Saturday is doubles, and a lot of it: 100 matches on the official schedule, starting at 09:00 local time, 08:00 in London. The mixed comes first, in three draws, with the 4.5 mixed quarter-finals at 13:30. The over-40 men’s and women’s doubles start at 15:00, and the 4.5 men’s and women’s doubles at 16:30, with their quarter-finals scheduled for 21:00 and 21:30. Semi-finals and finals are on Sunday, streamed on the tour’s YouTube channel.
And the singles leaders do not get a night off. Horcajuelo and Vega, the two men who won five from five on Friday, are partners in the 4.5 men’s doubles, in the same group as Antonio Guerra and Aitor Aramburu, Daniel Redondo and David Vian, and Jesús Moreno and Daniel Montero. They are on opposite sides of the singles semi-finals. On Saturday they are on the same side of the net. On Sunday morning, if both win their semis, they will not be.
