If you've stood at the baseline during open play, paddle in hand, and heard someone across the net call out "four, two, one" before serving, and had no idea what any of that meant, you're not alone. It's consistently the thing that trips up new players faster than any actual shot in the game.
The confusion makes sense once you see why it happens. Tennis keeps one score. Badminton keeps one score. Pickleball, in its standard format, keeps three numbers running at once, and you have to say all three out loud before every single serve.
Here's why. In pickleball's traditional scoring, only the serving team can score a point. If the team receiving serve wins the rally, nothing happens to the score, they just win the right to serve next. That's the first number and the second number: your team's score, then the other team's score, always in that order regardless of who's actually ahead.
The third number is where doubles gets its own twist. When a team wins the serve, both players usually get a turn serving before the serve passes back to the other side. The player who serves first is "server one." When their team loses a rally, the serve doesn't go to the other side yet, it goes to their partner, "server two." Only when server two also loses a rally does the serve pass across the net. That's what the third number tracks: which of the two servers on the current team is up.
There's one exception, and it's the exact thing that makes the very first point of any game sound wrong before you understand it. At the start of a game, the serving team only gets one server, not two, before the first side-out. To account for that, the very first score of the game is called 0-0-2, as if the team's "first" server is actually their second. It looks like a typo the first time you hear it. It isn't.
Put together, a full game might sound like this early on. 0-0-2 to start. The serving team wins the rally, so it's 1-0-2. They win again: 2-0-2. Then they lose a rally. Because that was their only server for this turn, it's a side-out, the serve crosses the net, and the score flips to the other team's perspective: 0-2-1, since it's now their turn and their first server. However the game unfolds after that, the pattern holds: your score first, their score second, and which of your two servers is up third, called out before every serve.
None of this is difficult once it clicks. It's just a lot to hold in your head while also trying to actually play, which is exactly why callers at bigger open play sessions or tournaments tend to be the ones who've been playing long enough to do it without thinking. If your regular group would rather skip all of it, a simpler rally scoring format exists too, where every rally scores a point for somebody regardless of who served, and you only ever track two numbers. Plenty of casual sessions use it for exactly that reason.
It's also why we built score-calling directly into PadBoard rather than leaving it to whoever's willing to do the math out loud. At the "points with server tracking" level, it tracks both servers, calls the score the right way before every serve, and marks who's serving on screen so nobody has to hold all three numbers in their head at once. The quick guide walks through how to turn it on, and the full PadBoard page covers everything else it does beyond scoring.