Four points — counted in the strangest way in sport

To win a game you need four points, and you must be at least two clear. Simple enough — except the points aren’t called 1, 2, 3, 4. They’re 15, 30, 40, game, and zero is “love.” So a game can read “30–love,” “40–15,” and so on.

Why? Honestly, no one is certain. The leading theory is the clock face: points marked at a quarter past, half past and three-quarters of an hour — 15, 30, 45 — with 45 later shortened to 40. “Love” may come from the French l’œuf (“the egg,” for the zero-shaped 0), or from playing “for love” — that is, for nothing. Both are educated guesses. Tennis kept a medieval scoring system and then forgot why. That uncertainty is, weirdly, the most honest thing anyone can tell you about it.

Deuce: the game with no maximum length

Reach 40–40 and you’re at “deuce.” Now the win-by-two rule bites: a player must take the next two points in a row. Win one and you have the “advantage”; lose the next and it’s back to deuce. In theory this can repeat forever, which is why a “four-point” game can swallow ten, fifteen or twenty points — try it in the simulator above by trading points at deuce.

Some formats cap it. No-ad scoring — used in much of doubles, college tennis and some tour events — settles deuce with a single deciding point, hard-limiting a game to four points. Flip the toggle in the widget to feel the difference.

The thing nobody tells you: more points can still lose

Here’s the genuinely counterintuitive truth about tennis. Points don’t pile up into one big total — they’re bundled into games, games into sets, and only the structure decides the winner. Which means you can win more points overall and still lose.

It isn’t a hypothetical. In the 2019 Wimbledon final, Roger Federer won 218 points to Novak Djokovic’s 204 — fourteen more — along with more games, more aces and more winners. He even held two championship points on his own serve. And he lost, 7–6, 1–6, 7–6, 4–6, 13–12, in the longest singles final Wimbledon has ever staged. The lesson: in tennis, when you win your points matters far more than how many. For how those games stack into sets, see the companion page, How Many Games in a Tennis Set.

So how long does a match actually last?

Tennis has no clock — a match ends only when someone wins, not when time runs out. In practice a best-of-three match runs around 90 minutes to two hours; a men’s best-of-five Grand Slam match averages closer to three hours. But without a clock, “average” means very little at the extremes.

The extreme is Isner v Mahut, Wimbledon 2010. With no final-set tiebreak in those days, the two men held serve until the deciding set reached an unimaginable 70–68. The match ran 11 hours and 5 minutes across three days, with 183 games and over 200 aces — the fifth set alone (8h11m) was longer than any previous match in history. It directly led to reform: Grand Slams introduced final-set tiebreaks, and since 2022 all four play a 10-point tiebreak at 6–6 in the deciding set, so no match can ever run quite that long again.

Points, games, sets, match — how it all stacks

The full hierarchy, smallest to largest: win 4 points (by two) to take a game; win 6 games (by two) to take a set, usually with a tiebreak at 6–6; win 2 sets (best-of-three) or 3 sets (best-of-five) to take the match. Four nested races, each with its own win-by-two twist — which is exactly why the maths of who-wins rarely matches the maths of who-scored-more.

Common questions

Sources

• ITF Rules of Tennis — the 15/30/40 game scoring, deuce, advantage and no-ad scoring.
• Wikipedia / Slate / Chicago Sun-Times — the 2019 Wimbledon final: Federer won 218 points to 204 and lost 7–6, 1–6, 7–6, 4–6, 13–12.
• Olympics.com / Tennis.com / ESPN — the Isner–Mahut 2010 marathon (11h05m, 70–68, 183 games) and the final-set tiebreak reforms (2019; unified 2022).

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