Why the Four Grand Slams Didn't Share One Tiebreak Rule Until 2022
Until 2022, a 6-6 final set meant a quick tiebreak at some majors and an open-ended marathon at others. Two record-setting matches, decades apart, are why that finally changed.
Twenty-two points to twenty. That was the final tiebreak score when Anna Blinkova beat Elena Rybakina in the second round of the 2024 Australian Open, the longest tiebreak in the history of women's Grand Slam tennis, decided only after Blinkova saved six match points and converted her tenth. It happened in a deciding set that, at any of the four majors before 2022, would have been played under a completely different set of rules depending on which tournament it was.
That's easy to forget now that every Grand Slam ends its matches the same way. For most of tennis history, it wasn't even close to true.
Four majors, four different endings
Until 2022, a final set tied at 6-6 meant something different depending on where you were playing. As TennisUpToDate's breakdown of the old rules lays out, the US Open had used a seven-point tiebreak at 6-6 since 1970, making it the outlier for decades in the other direction: the only major willing to end a decisive set quickly at all. Wimbledon went the opposite way, allowing games to pile up without a tiebreak until the set reached 12-12. The French Open used no tiebreak whatsoever in a final set; matches there were decided the old way, by advantage sets, meaning a player had to win by two clear games no matter how long that took. The Australian Open sat in between, adopting a 10-point tiebreak at 6-6 in 2019, the first major to try the format that would eventually become standard everywhere.
Daybreak Wire has previously covered how the US Open's early tiebreak spared it from ever producing its own version of Wimbledon's most infamous match. That match is exactly what forced the other three majors to catch up.
The match that broke the old system
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut's first-round meeting at Wimbledon in 2010 remains tennis's most extreme cautionary tale. Played under Wimbledon's no-tiebreak-until-12-12 rule of the time, the final set alone ran to 70-68 across three separate days, with the entire match consuming more than 11 hours of court time. Wimbledon's set format made that possible; nothing in the rules capped how long a final set with no tiebreak could theoretically run.
It took another marathon, in a different decade and a different tournament, to finally force the four majors into agreement. Blinkova and Rybakina's 22-20 tiebreak, a 42-point sequence that took more than half an hour on its own, became, in TennisUpToDate's words, the clearest recent proof that even a 10-point breaker "can abruptly end a long, drawn-out match with drama" without threatening to swallow an entire afternoon. It's the kind of length organizers can schedule around. Seventy-sixty-eight is not.
Why it took until 2022 to standardize
The Grand Slam Board's own joint statement on the change cited a desire to create greater consistency in the rules of the game at the Grand Slams
for players and fans navigating four different formats across a single season. Wimbledon and the French Open both adopted the 10-point, 6-6 tiebreak in 2022, finally aligning with the Australian Open's 2019 standard and superseding the US Open's older seven-point version. The French Open held out longest, since advantage sets were part of its identity for over a century, which is why it took a second high-profile marathon, rather than the first, to close the gap.
The new format hasn't eliminated drama, just relocated where it happens. Rybakina and Blinkova proved a 10-point tiebreak can still turn into its own kind of epic; it simply does so inside a scoreline broadcasters and tournament schedulers can actually plan a day around, instead of the open-ended arithmetic that let Isner-Mahut run into a third day. For players walking onto any Grand Slam court this month, at least, the rule at 6-6 is finally the same no matter which trophy is on the line.
The old inconsistency wasn't just a scoring footnote, either. A fifth set at the French Open, with no tiebreak at any score, was a fundamentally different physical proposition than a fifth set at the US Open, where a tiebreak had been guaranteed at 6-6 since 1970. Players moving between the four majors each season were, in effect, agreeing to four different endurance tests depending on which trophy was on the line. Unifying the rule didn't just tidy up a rulebook. It removed one more variable from a sport that spends the rest of its calendar standardizing everything else it can, from ball pressure to court surfaces.
