Tennis scoring system
Optimally, such tournaments have a number of competitors equal to a power of two in order to fully fill out a single elimination bracket.
In many professional and top-level amateur events, the brackets are seeded according to a recognised ranking system, in order to keep the best players in the field from facing each other until as late in the tournament as possible; additionally, if byes are necessary because of a less-than-full bracket, those byes in the first round are usually given to the highest-seeded competitors.
"[2] For tie-breaks, the calls are simply the number of points won by each player: The origins of the 15, 30, and 40 scores are believed to be medieval French.
However, in order to ensure that the game could not be won by a one-point difference in players' scores, the idea of "deuce" was introduced.
If that player scored a second time in a row, they would be awarded another ten and the clock would move to 60, signifying the end of the game.
[4][5] Although this suggestion might sound attractive, the first reference to tennis scoring (as mentioned above) is in the 15th century, and at that time clocks measured only the hours (1 to 12).
[7][8] Another theory is that the scoring nomenclature came from the French game jeu de paume (a precursor to tennis which initially used the hand instead of a racket).
Another possibility comes from the Dutch expression iets voor lof doen, which means to do something for praise, implying no monetary stakes.
[17][18] When this style of play is implemented, at deuce the receiver chooses from which side of the court he or she desires to return the serve.
To shorten matches, James Van Alen created a tie-breaker system, which was widely introduced in the early 1970s.
After every six points, the players switch ends of the court; note that the side-changes during the tiebreak will occur in the middle of a server's two-point sequence.
Following the tiebreak, the players switch ends of the court again, since the set score is always odd (13 games).
It also reduces the advantage the elements (e.g. wind and sun) could give playing the first six points of a seven-point tiebreak on one side of the court.
At the Australian Open, a tie-break was played in the final set at 6–all, but continued until one player had ten points, and was leading by two.
[26] The tiebreaker—commonly shortened to just "tiebreak"—was invented by James Van Alen and unveiled in 1965 as an experiment at the pro tournament he sponsored at Newport Casino, Rhode Island,[27] after an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to speed up the game by the use of his so-called "Van Alen Streamlined Scoring System" (VASSS).
For two years before the Open Era, in 1955 and 1956, the United States Pro Championship in Cleveland, Ohio, was played by VASSS rules.
The rules were created partially to limit the effectiveness of the powerful service of the reigning professional champion, Pancho Gonzales.
Even though the 1955 match went to five sets, with Gonzales barely holding on to win the last one 21–19, it is reported to have taken 47 minutes to complete.
[28] The fans attending the matches preferred the traditional rules, however, and in 1957 the tournament reverted to the old method of scoring.
Because of this, Van Alen derisively likened it to a "lingering death", in contrast to the "sudden-death tiebreaker" that he recommended and preferred.
The impetus to use some kind of a tie-breaking procedure gained force after a monumental 1969 struggle at Wimbledon between Pancho Gonzales and Charlie Pasarell.
After criticism of two lengthy semifinals in the 2018 Men's singles, Wimbledon announced the 2019 Championships would use final-set tiebreaks if the score reached 12–12.
[32][33] The first was in the Men's doubles third round, with Henri Kontinen and John Peers defeating Rajeev Ram and Joe Salisbury.
[22] Prior to 2022, the French Open remained the only grand slam tournament that did not use any form of a tie-break for singles in the final set.
This led to each of the four grand slam events having four different final-set scoring systems, and at times also across singles and doubles.
It is commonly utilized in various amateur leagues and high school tennis as a shorter alternative to a best-of-three match, but longer than a traditional tie-break set.
(As noted above, an alternate form of writing the tiebreak score lists only the loser's score—e.g., "7–6(6)" for the fourth set in the example.)
The numbers in parentheses, normally included in printed scorelines but omitted when spoken, indicate the score of the tiebreaker game in a set.
Roger Federer lost the 2019 Wimbledon final, despite winning more games (and points, in fact) than Novak Djokovic.
[38] For formal scorekeeping, the official scoring the match (e.g., the chair umpire) fills out a scorecard, either on paper or electronically.
