Tennis tour

Last updated February 27, 2019

A tennis tour (or tennis circuit) is tennis played in tournament format at a series of venues – a tour – over during a set period of weeks or months. Professional tour tennis is played globally with one season consisting of one calendar year. Several tournaments are held each week as players win prize money and earn ranking points. A player's ranking determines her or his ability to enter a particular tournament, as tournaments vary in the amount money and points obtainable. Winning a tournament typically requires winning four to six matches in succession, generally a match a day, as play is single-loss elimination.

Tennis is a racket sport that can be played individually against a single opponent (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over or around a net and into the opponent's court. The object of the game is to maneuver the ball in such a way that the opponent is not able to play a valid return. The player who is unable to return the ball will not gain a point, while the opposite player will.

A tournament is a competition involving a relatively large number of competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:

One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentrated into a relatively short time interval.
A competition involving a number of matches, each involving a subset of the competitors, with the overall tournament winner determined based on the combined results of these individual matches. These are common in those sports and games where each match must involve a small number of competitors: often precisely two, as in most team sports, racket sports and combat sports, many card games and board games, and many forms of competitive debating. Such tournaments allow large numbers to compete against each other in spite of the restriction on numbers in a single match.

Prize money has a distinct meaning in warfare, especially naval warfare, where it was a monetary reward paid out under prize law to the crew of a ship for capturing or sinking an enemy vessel. The claims for the bounty are usually heard in a Prize Court.

Current professional tour tennis

Currently professional male tennis players compete in one of three tours, while there are two tours for female pro players. The highest level of tour tennis is the ATP World Tour and the WTA Tour, for men and women respectively. The ATP World Tour is integrated with the second tier ATP Challenger Tour and the third tier ITF Men's Circuit, as a single, unified global ranking system is kept, the ATP Rankings. For women, a player's results on both the WTA Tour and ITF Women's Circuit determine her WTA Ranking.

The ATP Challenger Tour, known until the end of 2008 as the ATP Challenger Series, is a series of international men's professional tennis tournaments. The top tier of annual men's tennis is the ATP World Tour, Challenger Tour events are the second highest level of competition, and the Futures tournaments on the ITF Men's Circuit are the third and fourth tier of international professional tennis competition. The ATP Challenger Tour is administered by the Association of Tennis Professionals. Players who succeed on the ATP Challenger Tour earn sufficient ranking points to become eligible for main draw or qualifying draw entry at ATP World Tour tournaments. Players on the Challenger Tour are either young players looking to advance their careers, those who fail to qualify for ATP events, or former ATP winners looking to get back into the big tour.

The ITF Men's Circuit is a series of professional tennis tournaments held around the world that are organized by the International Tennis Federation. The ITF Men's Circuit represents the lowest rung of the men's professional tennis ladder. ITF tournaments are incorporated into the ATP rankings, enabling young professionals to progress on to the ATP Challenger Tour and ultimately the full ATP World Tour. Nearly every professional player has spent some time on the ITF Men's Circuit.

The ITF Women's Circuit is a series of professional tennis tournaments run by the International Tennis Federation for female professional tennis players.

Female players are free to play in events in either tour, although top-ranked players almost always play just in WTA Tour events. In fact, they are obliged to appear in certain of the most prestigious tournaments and in a certain number of these during the year or face being penalized by the tour. The same is true of male players. For singles tennis, both men and women ranked outside of the world top 40 or so and inside the top 180 or so will compete in both the top and second tier tour events. For male players, those ranked outside of the top 180 will then compete on both the ATP Challenger Tour and ITF Men's Circuit, while most players ranked outside the top 400 or so must compete on the ITF Men's Circuit. (A few players, despite their ranking, have a certain personal stature that allows them to be granted wild cards into tournaments. It may be that they were once ranked higher or have a certain level of fame, either globally or where the tournament is being held.)

A wild card is a tournament or playoff berth awarded to an individual or team that fails to qualify in the normal way, for example by having a high ranking or winning a qualifying stage. In some events, wild cards are chosen freely by the organizers. Other events have fixed rules. Some North American professional sports leagues compare the records of teams which did not qualify directly by winning a division or conference.

A ranking cut-off is maintained that varies for each tournament - players ranked above the cut-off gain direct entry in that event's main draw while players ranked below it yet above a second cut-off gain entry into a qualifying tournament for the main draw. In singles tennis, such a player typically needs to win two or three qualifying matches to qualify for entry into the main draw. Matches are nearly always contested best two-of-three sets. Tiebreaks are the norm in deciding sets level at six games apiece. A typical tournament in any tier main draw for singles consists of 32 entrants, while the ATP 1000 events feature 58. For doubles, generally 16 teams compete and matches tied at one set each are settled by match tiebreaks. A few tournaments, notably the season-ending championship, feature round-robin play where players play initially in a mini-league instead of in the typical single-loss elimination. Generally in such events however, the final few rounds are still played in the typical knock-out format.

A round-robin tournament is a competition in which each contestant meets all other contestants in turn. A round-robin contrasts with an elimination tournament, in which participants are eliminated after a certain number of losses.

The ATP and WTA tours generally hold more than one tournament each week, while the ITF circuits, which oversees several events weekly, hold a few events during the month of December, the top tier tours' off-season.

Grand slam play

Grand slam tournament play is unique in that, for men, matches are best three of five sets, and that both female and male players do not play singles (or doubles) matches in consecutive days, barring inclement weather or other unforeseen scheduling issues. The fields are expanded as one hundred twenty-eight singles players and 64 doubles teams are featured in the main draws.

Previous world tennis tours

Men's

Prior to 1990 professional men's tour tennis consisted of two competing tennis circuits, the Grand Prix tennis tour and World Championship Tennis. This was particularly true during the 1970s, when tour tennis was started in its current format - previous to this, during the 1930s through to the 1960s, touring professional players tended to play exhibition matches instead of tournaments, as they were given appearance money instead of prize money. This changed most significantly with the advent of open tennis, being in 1968. By 1973, computer rankings were established for singles tennis. (Computer rankings for doubles tennis was begun in the early 1980s.)

World Championship Tennis (WCT) was a tour for professional male tennis players established in 1968 and lasted until the emergence of the ATP Tour in 1990. A number of tennis tournaments around the world were affiliated with WCT and players were ranked in a special WCT ranking according to their results in those tournaments.

By the 1980s, the Grand Prix tour was the main men's tennis tour, while WCT events were in certain years even part of the Grand Prix circuit. In 1990, all top tier tour events became part of the ATP Tour as the Association of Tennis Professionals took control of professional tour tennis from the ITF's Men's Tennis Council.

Challenger tournaments were begun in 1978 and initially were separate events that did not comprise a unified tour. At some point the ATP Challenger Series was formed, the precursor to today's ATP Challenger Tour. Futures tennis tournaments were started by the ITF in the late 1990s. Over time these one-week events replaced satellite tournaments, a mini-circuit typically held over a four-week period at one location. By 2007 satellite events were entirely phased out on the ITF Men's Circuit.

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