The Grand Slams Finally Agreed How to End a Match

Four tournaments, four endings

For most of tennis’ modern history, how a grand slam match finished depended on which one you were at.

Australian Open: a 10-point tiebreak at 6-6.

US Open: a seven-point tiebreak at 6-6.

Wimbledon: a seven-point tiebreak at 12-12 — a compromise adopted after matches that ran to absurd lengths, keeping most of the old character while capping the extreme.

Roland-Garros: nothing. The final set was played out until somebody led by two games, however long that took.

Four events, at the same level, in the same sport, with four different answers to the most consequential question in a match.

Why that persisted so long

It is easy to read the inconsistency as neglect. It was closer to the opposite.

Each rule expressed something about its tournament. Roland-Garros’ refusal to cap the final set fitted a clay event where endurance is the point. Wimbledon’s 12-12 was a deliberately conservative fix, introduced only after very long matches became a scheduling problem.

The majors are not run by a single body. Each is owned and organised by its own national federation or club, and the Grand Slam Board coordinates rather than commands. Where nobody has to agree, nobody does.

The 2022 decision, and its stated reason

In March 2022 the Grand Slam Board agreed a single rule for all four: at 6-6 in the final set, the match is won by the first to 10 points with a margin of two or more. The ITF’s Rules of Tennis Committee approved it as a trial, beginning at Roland-Garros.

The reason given was consistency — for players and fans alike.

Note what that is not. It is not a claim that the 10-point tiebreak is the fairest way to end a match, or the most exciting, or the most faithful to tennis. It is an argument that having one rule beats having four, more or less regardless of which one is chosen.

That is a genuinely different kind of justification, and it is worth taking seriously. A sport whose climactic moment works differently at each of its biggest events is asking a lot of a casual viewer, and asking players to prepare for four endings.

The 10-point tiebreak is a compromise between two answers

A seven-point tiebreak is short. In a fifth set, after four or five hours, deciding on seven points feels light — a single mis-hit return can end a match that has been level all afternoon.

An uncapped final set is the other extreme, and its problems are logistical rather than philosophical: players injured by duration, schedules destroyed, later matches pushed into darkness.

Ten points with a two-point margin sits between. It is long enough that one error is survivable and a player must sustain quality across several points, and short enough to fit a schedule.

It is the same reasoning that produced the tiebreak itself in the 1970s, applied a second time at a higher level — and the same reasoning behind padel’s Star Point, which lets deuce be contested twice and then guarantees resolution.

What was lost

Something real was given up, and the sport should be honest about it.

The uncapped final set produced tennis’ most famous matches — the ones remembered precisely because they would not end. Those cannot happen now. The scoreline that made them possible has been closed off deliberately.

The 12-12 tiebreak was arguably the better compromise: it preserved the long final set almost entirely, and only intervened at a point almost no match ever reached. Wimbledon gave that up not because it was failing but because the other three were doing something else.

That is the cost of harmonisation. Consistency is achieved by everybody moving to the same place, and the tournament with the most distinctive rule gives up the most.

The broader direction

The final-set decision belongs to a run of changes pointing the same way: shot clocks, standardised warm-ups, electronic line calling, and match durations that fit a broadcast window.

Each is defensible on its own. Together they describe a sport steadily removing its variation — between tournaments, between surfaces, between officials — in exchange for predictability.

Tennis’ distinctiveness was always partly that its four biggest events were not the same as each other. There is a limit to how much of that can be traded away before they are simply four hard courts and a clay one.

For the rest of the scoring system, see tennis rules and tennis rankings explained.