7
votes
Can someone explain to me how scoring a tennis set works?
I’m new to the sport, and I understand how you score a game and a match. I don’t get scoring sets though. Could someone explain to me how it and tiebreaker games work?
It's nested so you're trying to win games, winning games wins you sets, and winning sets wins the match.
The lowest level is the game. This is scored as love, 15, 30, and 40. Nobody's really sure why it's numbered this way, they guess that it was easiest to keep score by turning the hands on a clock. So you can think of "winning" the game as turning the clock a full rotation. The only hitch is that you have to win by 2. This is where the "deuce" comes from, when both players are at 40. So it's 40 advantaged in (if the leader is serving) or out (if the leader is receiving). They also sometimes designate ad in/out as "45."
If you lose on the second serve then you go back down to 40 and it's deuce again. Once you make a full rotation then you get a "point" for the set. Each game has one person serving and one receiving.
The set is a "set" of games. This is scored by points, which is the number of games you've won. Players can decide how many games it takes to take a set as long as it's an even number. It can be 2, 4, or 6 (or more if you want, but 6 is standard in professional tennis. You must, however, win by 2. So if it's 6:5, then you need to make it 7:5. If it ends up being 6:6 you play a tie-breaker. Once upon a time, and in some tournaments, they don't do tie-breakers. They just keep going until someone wins by two. This leads to epic tennis marathons and they were amazing, though bad for television schedules.
At the highest level is the match, this is why the players are there. It's the battle between Federer and Nadal or whatever. Players can also decide how many sets they want to decide the match, but professional tennis goes for best of 3.