SOLVEI MatchPoint turns a Garmin Forerunner 55 into a wrist-worn scorekeeper for padel, tennis, and beach tennis: five physical buttons to score points without taking your eyes off the game, a state machine that correctly handles advantages and golden points even in doubles and triples scoring, plus automatic GPS and heart-rate tracking for the whole session.
Keeping score while you play
Anyone who's played padel or beach tennis knows: keeping track of the score while playing is an ordeal. You get it wrong, you forget, you argue about it. What you need is something that does it automatically, without distraction, without pulling out your phone, without interrupting play.
A wrist watch is the only device that actually makes sense on the court. But until now there was no app that correctly handled padel's complexity — with single, double, and triple advantage rules — while also recording the session's biometric data the way any sports activity on Garmin does.
Forerunner 55: five buttons, a round screen
208×208 px
The Garmin Forerunner 55 has a 208×208-pixel circular MIP display. It isn't touch: you interact with it exclusively through five physical buttons. On the left side, top to bottom: LIGHT, UP, and DOWN. On the right side: START/STOP (the red button) and BACK/LAP.
The app's button mapping is designed to be used mid-game: UP scores a point for your own team, DOWN scores a point for the opponents, BACK undoes the last point. START opens the pause menu.
At the top: date and time. Upper-middle area: the current set's score (games won). In the center — the main area — the game score: 15, 30, 40, ADV, AD1/AD2/AD3, GP. At the bottom: dots for sets won, heart rate, steps.
Eight modes, one smart menu
Every set can use a different mode, chosen from a menu at the start of the set. The menu always remembers the last choice and places the cursor on it automatically: most of the time, you just press START without scrolling anything.
A continuous tie-break from 1 to 7, with at least a 2-point margin. At 5-5, play continues with no limit: 7-5, 8-6, 9-7… until the margin is reached.
Tie-break ∞ Margin ≥ 2Classic 15-30-40 scoring. At 40-40, a sudden-death golden point is played: the next point wins the game, no advantages.
Golden PointAt 40-40, one advantage (AD1) is granted. Whoever gets it wins by taking the next point; otherwise it goes straight to golden point.
AD1 → GP !The most complex system: AD1, AD2, AD3. Every return to deuce advances the counter. Golden point only kicks in after AD3.
AD1→AD2→AD3 → GP !Classic game scoring. At 40-40, a sudden-death golden point is played, identical to Padel Golden. No advantages, maximum speed.
NEW Golden PointTraditional, unlimited advantages. At 40-40, play continues until one side wins two consecutive points. ADV forever.
NEW ADV ∞Classic tie-break: first to 7 points with at least a 2-point margin. At 6-6, play continues until the margin is reached.
First to 7 Margin ≥ 2Super tie-break: first to 10 points with at least a 2-point margin. Widely used as the deciding set in doubles.
First to 10 Margin ≥ 2From AD1 to GP: the deuce state machine
The trickiest part of the app is handling deuce in padel's three-advantage rule. It isn't a simple counter: it's a state machine that advances on every return to deuce and blocks further advantages after the third.
Padel · 3 Advantages
On the display, the advantage appears large in the center of the screen, with the opponent's side dimmed. A small badge at the top shows the counter: AD 2/3 means we're on the second advantage out of three.
You're on AD2, you have the advantage. Win the point: the game is yours. Lose the point: it's back to 40-40, advancing to AD3. Lose AD3 too: golden point kicks in. The next point wins the game, whoever takes it.
Open-ended sets, players can change between sets
A match doesn't have a predefined number of sets: it's decided on the court. The app doesn't ask how many sets you'll play — it adds a set every time you press UP on the end-of-set screen. When you want to stop, you press DOWN.
Players can change from one set to the next. That's why the app doesn't handle names on the court: the Forerunner 55's screen has no keyboard. Names get added afterward, over the web, on the external service where the data is archived.
Rain, injuries, breaks: four ways out
Holding START during a set opens the pause menu. Resume goes back to the match with no other action needed. Suspend saves the entire state to persistent memory and pauses the Garmin activity to save battery: when the app reopens, the match is detected automatically.
End here saves only the sets already completed, discarding the one in progress but keeping all the biometric data gathered so far. Abandon saves nothing and wipes the state completely.
GPS, heart rate, calories — and a private web service
Every match gets saved to Garmin Connect as a sports activity: GPS track of the court, heart rate with a chart, total calories, steps. In parallel, the app sends the score — set by set — to an external service over HTTP, through the paired phone's Bluetooth connection.
Set number, mode used, final score, winner, start and end timestamps, average heart rate, steps for the set, GPS position of the court. The players_a and players_b fields stay empty and get filled in afterward over the web: players don't need to be contacts in anyone's address book.
The external service is a simple FastAPI API with a SQLite database, paired with a minimal web UI to browse the history, add player names to each set, and export the data as CSV.
A serious scorekeeper, for people who play seriously
SOLVEI Sport isn't a generic scorekeeping app: it's built around the real rules of padel and beach tennis, with all the complexity of the advantage system, the uncapped tie-break, and golden-point handling after one, two, or three tied advantages.
It works with five physical buttons on a 208-pixel round screen, with no connection required, no touching the screen, no pulling out your phone. By the time the match ends, the data is already recorded — both on Garmin Connect and on your own private server.