Beach volleyball keeps the same net heights as indoor play — 2.43 meters for men and 2.24 meters for women — but changes nearly everything else about team structure and scoring. Each side fields only two players rather than six, on a smaller 16-by-8-meter sand court with no attack line at all, since with just two defenders per side, restricting where a player may attack from would leave too little coverage. Sets are played to 21 points rather than 25 (15 in a deciding third set), still requiring a two-point winning margin, and a match is decided by best-of-three sets instead of best-of-five.
Substitutions do not exist in beach volleyball: the two players who start a match must finish it, and if one is injured and cannot continue, the team forfeits rather than bringing in a reserve. Ball-handling rules are also enforced more strictly on open-hand and overhand contacts in beach play, particularly on a hard-driven ball, reflecting the outdoor game's historical emphasis on cleaner technique in the absence of a libero to specialize in ball control.
A block that costs a touch
One further rules difference matters tactically: in beach volleyball, if a blocker touches the ball, that contact counts as one of the team's three allowed touches, leaving only two more contacts to complete the attack — unlike indoor volleyball, where a block never counts against the three-touch limit.
No libero, no rotation restrictions to speak of
Because beach teams have only two players, several indoor-specific rules simply do not apply at all: there is no libero and no back-row attack restriction in the same sense, since with only two players covering the whole court, requiring one of them to stay permanently in a 'back row' role would make the format unplayable. Any player may attack from anywhere on a beach court, which is one of the clearest structural reasons beach volleyball demands such complete, well-rounded individual skill compared with the specialized six-person indoor game.
