Tennis rules, guides and tools

New to tennis, or arguing about the score mid-match? Start with how to keep score in tennis. It covers love, 15, 30, 40, deuce and advantage, sets, tiebreaks, best of 3 or 5 and who serves, with a real deuce game and a real tiebreak scored point by point.

The other pages each answer one question that comes up on court: how a 7-point tiebreak is scored, who serves each tiebreak point and when to change ends (there is a helper for that), how a 10-point match tiebreak differs from the Grand Slam final-set tiebreak, how no-ad scoring settles deuce with one point, and why tennis counts 15, 30, 40 at all. FAST4 gets its own page for players trying the short format.

Every rule is checked against the ITF Rules of Tennis or the body that runs the format. The point-by-point examples are scored by a line-for-line port of the scoring engine in the tennis score tracker app, so the scores match what the app computes. Where the app does not support a format, the page says so and its example is checked by hand.