Seeding for Whist Format - 8 Players

[pbails]

Situation: Tennis doubles tournament with 8 players. I know the seeds/ ranks of the players before they play. I want to use a rotation that provides the most balanced balance round robin I can where everyone plays with everyone once and against everyone twice. I would define balanced as a match where both teams have a good chance of winning. 

Questions: 
1. Is "Whist" schedule the best one to use to make the most balance match ups? Is there a better format to use? If I should use Whist, should I assign team 1 to number 1 and so on and so forth?

2. I want to make the event have a second round robin, what is the best way to run the second round robin without having many (or ideally any) repeat matches from the first round robin?

Thank you for this amazing forum! 

[Ian Wakeling]

The first question is difficult and computer optimization may be the only way to work out a good way of assigning seed values to the player numbers in a schedule.  Julian Wiseman has done this for the schedules on his web site, for example see this schedule and the link underneath for the "unfairness measure" that has been minimised.

For your 2nd question concerning an additional round-robin with 8 players you could use the following Whist schedule.  It contains the same groupings of 4 people on a court as above, however they are split into partners and opponents in different ways.
  (8  1 v 5  7)  (2  6 v 3  4) 
  (8  2 v 6  1)  (3  7 v 4  5) 
  (8  3 v 7  2)  (4  1 v 5  6) 
  (8  4 v 1  3)  (5  2 v 6  7) 
  (8  5 v 2  4)  (6  3 v 7  1) 
  (8  6 v 3  5)  (7  4 v 1  2) 
  (8  7 v 4  6)  (1  5 v 2  3)