You are referring to the
spouse avoiding schedule here. I had not considered this because I thought you were asking for all the players a player meets, either as partner or opponent, to be different. If you don't mind players meeting the same person twice, once as partner and once as opponent, then as you have found out, things get easier. It works especially well for 24 players as the standard schedule has 6 courts per round, so each round divides nicely into to two sub-rounds on 3 courts with each player exactly once (note it is not the same 12 players alternating off and on, so there will still be some back-to-back games and some players with 2 byes in a row, but there should be no runs of 3 or more back-to-back games). For the 28 player schedule I did start with a schedule for 7 courts, but this does not divide so nicely. I think it will have the property that all players play 3 times in the first 7 rounds, and twice in the last 5 rounds. Sorry, I don't have any way of reducing the frequency of back-to-back games here, but you could try automating what you were trying manually, and optimize the order of the rounds with a computer.
