A New Tennis Scoring System

Delays in the scheduled starting times of tennis matches have often occurred due to longer-than-average previous matches. This study addresses this problem of delays and devises a new scoring system to reduce it. Thus, the aim of this study was to take the present tennis scoring system and modify it by as little as possible to produce a new scoring system with a more predictable duration. The new system is a best-of-five half-sets system. This system is very similar to the present best-of-three tie-breaker sets system with one exception—the standard deviation of the number of points in a match is typically considerably smaller for the new system. Also, scoring systems with negatively skewed distributions of duration are seen to be preferable for tournaments.