Team balance and why it is off by default
By default, ratings are not used
With auto rotation running normally, skill ratings play no part in choosing who plays or who partners whom. The picker works only from playing history: who has partnered whom, who has faced whom, who is owed court time and who has just played games back to back.
This is a deliberate choice, not a missing feature, and the reasons are below.
The rule
Team balance is a per-session setting. When it is off, the rotation ignores ratings completely: the same roster produces the same games whether or not anyone has a rating at all.
Why it is off by default
Balanced teams and partner variety pull against each other, and not by a small amount. Balancing by rating keeps pairing the strongest player with the weakest one available. Done for every game, strong players never partner each other and weaker players never partner each other, which removes a large share of the possible partner pairs from the session.
That works against what the rotation is for. The aim of a club session is that everyone plays with everyone. Always pairing by strength is how a competitive league works, and it puts the rating order on show every round. The person who is always the stronger half notices, and so does the person who is always the other half.
There is a data reason too. Balance compares the rating each player had when they joined the session, and a new player starts on 1500 rather than on a measured figure. Balancing hard on an estimate that has not settled yet locks in whatever that estimate got wrong.
None of this says balanced games are bad. A club that wants closer games can turn balance on for any session. The default is about what should happen when nobody has asked for anything.
What happens when it is turned on
Balance does not replace the variety order. It only steps in when the split that variety prefers would produce a lopsided game. It applies to doubles games, which in padel means every game.
The rule
Take the four players the rotation has chosen and rank the three possible ways of splitting them into two pairs, by variety. If the top-ranked split has a team-average rating gap of 250 points or less per side, it is used unchanged and ratings are never looked at. If the gap is bigger, the other splits with a gap of 250 or less are considered instead, still in variety order. Only if no split comes in under the limit does the most even split win. The first game of a session follows the same rule.
A gap of 250 points per side means odds of roughly 80/20. Up to that point the weaker pair still has a real chance; beyond it the result is mostly decided before the first serve. The limit is deliberately that wide. A tighter one, on a roster with a big spread of ratings, never lets the strongest player partner the next strongest, and the same few pairs end up playing each other all session.
When balance does override the split variety preferred, the lineup says so: the reason shown for that game names the rating balance instead of the variety reason it would otherwise have given.
Balance only changes how the four are split into pairs. It does not change which four players are on court. Who plays is decided by the rotation on coverage and court time before balance is looked at, so turning it on cannot group the strong players onto one court.
The comparison uses the rating each player had when they joined the session, not a value that moves as play goes on. Ratings only change when a session ends anyway, so games picked at 9pm are judged on the same basis as games picked at 7pm.