What is the Rally-Point Scoring System?

Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Savannah
Marketing Manager

If you’re new to Badminton, you might take one look at the serving rules and rally-point scoring system and say, “what the heck is this?!” Don’t worry; we know that it can be a bit intimidating at first, but we promise you, it's not as complicated as you may think! Here’s a bit of a breakdown to help you out before hitting the court.

First, these are some key things to keep in mind:

  • Teams will use any suitable means to determine who gets to serve first, or pick a side.
  • When serving, you must hit to the opponent in the court diagonally opposite to you, but once the game is in play you may hit towards either courts.

Now this is where the rally-point system comes into play. Every time there is a serve, there will be a point scored. If a team's score is even, they will serve from the right service court and if a team's score is odd, they will serve from the left service court. There is no maximum amount of times that one player can serve consecutively and this ultimately does require the partners to switch sides repeatedly whenever they score a point off their own serve. However, please keep in mind that if they score the point off their opponent's serve, the players do not switch sides. This then guarantees that the serves will alternate as the game goes on.

Now those are the basic rules behind it, but if you’re like me and learn better by visuals, take a look at our Rally-Point Serving Diagram for a point by point example.