Badminton Rules for Beginners: The Faults Nobody Told You About in the Gully

Almost everyone who grew up playing badminton in a lane, on a terrace or in a society compound remembers the argument. The shuttle lands right on the chalk line. One side shouts 'out', the other shouts 'in', a cousin who was not even watching gives a verdict, and the game carries on with somebody sulking.

Street badminton runs on house rules. The washing line is a let, the neighbour's wall is out, and whoever owns the racket gets to serve first. That is half the fun. But it also means plenty of people have played for years without ever learning how the real game is scored, where you are meant to stand when you serve, or which of their favourite tricks are actually faults.

This guide covers the official rules in plain words, the ones that settle the arguments. Then it shows how to practise them in our street badminton game, where the court is a lane and the net is a dupatta on a rope.

Badminton uses rally point scoring. Every rally gives a point to someone, whichever side served. This is different from the older system some people still play at home, where only the serving side could score. The world body for the sport, the Badminton World Federation (BWF), switched to rally scoring in 2006.

A game goes to 21 points, and a match is the best of three games. If the score reaches 20-all, you have to win by two clear points, so a game can end 22-20 or 25-23. It cannot go on forever, though: at 29-all, the next point wins, and the game ends 30-29.

There are two short breaks. When the leading side reaches 11 points in a game, players get up to 60 seconds of rest, and there are up to two minutes between games. Players change ends after each game, and in a third game they change again when the leader reaches 11, so neither side spends the whole decider with the light or the draught in their favour.

Shorter formats, including games to 11 and games to 15, have been trialled and debated over the years, but 21 is still the standard you will find in tournaments.

The serve is where most street players go wrong without knowing it, so it is worth taking slowly. Each half of the court is split into a right and a left service court. The server stands in one and serves diagonally across the net into the opposite one, and the receiver waits in that box.

Which side you serve from depends on your own score. When it is even (and zero counts as even), you serve from the right. When it is odd, you serve from the left. Win the rally and you serve again, from the other side. Lose it and the serve passes over.

Doubles uses the same even-and-odd rule, based on the serving side's score. Only one player serves at a time. While your side keeps winning, the same player keeps serving and switches between right and left. When your side wins the serve back, you do not swap places first: whoever is standing in the right box or left box, depending on the score, is the one who serves.

A full court is 13.4 m long and 6.1 m wide, and it is covered in lines that confuse almost everyone at first. The trick is that not every line is used in every game.

In singles, the court is long and narrow. You ignore the outer side strip, so the court is 5.18 m wide, but a serve can go all the way to the back line. In doubles, it is the other way round when serving. The outer sidelines are in, so the serving box is wider, but there is a second line 76 cm in front of the back line, and a serve that lands beyond it is out. Once the serve has been returned, the whole doubles court is in play right to the back.

The short service line, 1.98 m from the net, is the same in both. A serve that does not reach it is a fault. It is a good line to remember if you are chalking a court yourself.

If you have ever misjudged a clear and watched it drop just behind you, you have met the strangest thing about badminton. A shuttle is 16 feathers fixed into a rounded cork, weighing about five grams. It leaves the racket faster than the ball in almost any other racket sport, and then it brakes harder than any of them.

In 2015, a team of French physicists published a paper called 'The physics of badminton' that described exactly this. Because the feathers catch so much air, a shuttle's flight is not the smooth arc a ball makes. It rises, slows sharply, and then falls almost straight down, as if it had hit an invisible wall. The same paper explains why the shuttle always turns over to fly cork first, however it is hit.

The speed at the start can be startling. In 2023, India's Satwiksairaj Rankireddy set a Guinness World Record with a smash measured at 565 km/h. Yet the same shuttle, hit softly, can barely clear the net and die. That is why reading the shuttle, knowing where it will drop rather than where it is going, matters more than raw speed for beginners. Good players get under the shuttle early and wait for it.

Badminton has deep Indian roots. In the 1860s and 1870s, British army officers stationed in India played a version of the game, and it was often called 'Poona' after the city where it was popular. The name that stuck came later, from Badminton House, an estate in Gloucestershire, England, where the game was played.

Whatever the history books say, the version most Indians know best was never played on a proper court. It was played in the evening, between two houses, with a string for a net, until it was too dark to see the shuttle or somebody's mother called them in for dinner.

We built Gully Badminton, a free street badminton game that runs in the browser, around exactly that kind of evening. You play side-on in an Indian neighbourhood: the court is chalked on the lane, a dupatta tied on a rope between two balconies is the net, and the score is chalked on a small blackboard hanging on the wall.

The rules are the real ones, shortened for quick matches. Most matches are first to 11, and the champs play to 15. You still need to win by two, up to a cap where the next point decides it, and the game calls deuce, match point and golden point as they come. Every rally scores a point, just as in rally scoring.

The serving rules from this guide are in there too. You serve from your box, and moving while you serve is a foot fault, just like the real rule about keeping both feet still. A serve that lands short of the line is a fault. You can choose a short serve that drops just over the rope or a high one to the back, the same two serves players use on a real court.

Most importantly, the shuttle behaves the way the physicists described: a quick start, a hard brake, then a near-vertical fall. So the skill the game asks for first is the same one a coach would teach on day one, which is to judge where the shuttle will come down and get there before it does.

There are 80 matches across eight places, from the Gully Lane to the Colony Final, with ten opponents in each. The tenth in every place is its champ. What makes them useful for learning is that each one has a habit, and each habit has a real badminton answer.

The Smasher hits anything above the rope, so you learn to keep the shuttle low with drives and drops instead of feeding them high clears. The Net hugger stands right at the rope, which is exactly when a clear over their head works. The Lobber keeps sending it sky-high to your back line, so you learn to move back early. The Chappal steady is slow on their feet but never misses, so the answer is to make them run from front to back. The Retriever gets to everything and teaches patience, and the Ace server puts tricky serves right on the lines.

Two are about the score rather than the shuttle. The Slow starter is sleepy at first, so you win the early points while you can. The Fighter plays best when behind, so you learn to close a game out instead of easing off. Real players learn the same lessons; here, each opponent teaches one at a time.

Every place has three side goals, listed on its card on the rangoli, and many of them are the same drills a coach would set. A rally of 10 shots trains consistency: keeping the shuttle in play instead of going for a winner too early. Eight perfect hits in a match trains timing, getting under the shuttle before you swing. Two aces trains the serve. Winning from 4 points down trains the calm needed to come back.

Gully Rally is good practice for consistency too. It is an endless rally against Chintu, your first opponent, where every clean return scores a point and a winner scores three, and you have three lives. As your score climbs, Chintu sharpens and the lane gets busier, so it rewards steady, safe returns more than wild smashes.

Stars, wins and side goals all pay coins, and the place to spend them is the Steel Almirah, the kind of steel cupboard found in many Indian homes. Its five rackets are rated on power, control and reach, which are the same trade-offs players weigh when they buy a real racket. More power means a harder, steeper smash. More control means fewer mishits. More reach means fewer shuttles just out of range.

You begin with the balanced Lane Racket. If your shots keep floating, the Wooden Classic is the control pick. The Steel Frame suits players who like to smash, the Long Reach helps when the far corners keep beating you, and the Gold Thread, the most expensive, is strong at everything. The caps, tees and shuttle colours change only how you look, never how the shuttle flies.