Tie-Break: Short Set vs Fast4

In the “Hallelujah!” department, I have officially completed the “Short Sets” rule as presented in Appendix V.1 of the USTA Friend at Court. Statistically, there are 55 words in the body of the “Short Set” rule, yet somehow I wrote about that topic for 8 days. Today I will attempt to get through Appendix V.2 in a single post.

Short Set Tie-Break

When playing Short Sets only, a Short Set tie-break may be used. The first player/team to win five points wins the “Game” and “Set,” with a deciding point if the score reaches four all. The order and number of serves shall be determined by the sanctioning body. Players/Teams will only change ends after the first four (4) points have been played.

USTA Friend at Court, Appendix V.2

Cue the opening riff from the Finale from the William Tell Overture, because I am off and running on another Fast4 rant. This is the last one for the month of February. I promise. Ordinarily this would be a fairly safe pledge to make on the 28th of February, but the calendar has conspired against me by adding a 29th day this year.

We have already covered the territory that the Friend at Court contains scoring rules for ‘Short Sets” rather than Fast4, yet plays the NTRP National Championships under Fast4. Just as a short set is a lot like a Fast4 set, the tie-break procedures are also similar. The following format description is verbatim from the USTA “About NTRP National Championships” page:

• Fast Four: Best-of-three sets to four games, no-ad scoring, tiebreak at 3-3 all.
• Tiebreak is first to 5 points, win by one.

So let’s assume that the tiebreak here is the USTA definition of the “Short Set” Tie-Break. Spoiler alert! This format is less than ideal for singles and is not at all equitable for doubles. The best way to illustrate the flaws is to step through the tie-break decision points for doubles.

I was not told there would be math required in the writing of this blog, but I think it is reasonable to assert that when a tie-break is reached, whether the score is 3-3 or 4-4 the game count will be even. Thus there is no change of ends to start the tie-break game and the player whose turn it is to serve will do so from the end that the player would have served from in the next game. This covers the first two points.

This is where things get whacked out because it is not clear which of the partners serves points 3 and 4 in the”Short Set” tiebreaker and there is no equitable answer. Recall that the official rule indicates that that the service order is up to the discretion of the sanctioning body. Let’s examine the alternatives.

If the service order is strictly preserved, then both partners of the second team to serve in the tiebreaker will be serving from the opposite end from which they served during the set. This can be a tremendous disadvantage under many circumstances such as forcing a righty/lefty combination to both serve into the sun or if there is a service style that makes serving with or against the wind more preferable. It is horribly unfair for one team to continue to play all serves from the side that each partner has been serving from in the set while the other team is forced to play all serves from the opposite side in the tie-breaker.

An alternative possibility is that the service order is broken such that the server on the third and fourth point is the same player that held on that side to even the score at 4-4. (Or 3-3 at the discretion of the sanctioning body.) This is probably the most competitively balanced interpretation, but this can also create an advantage for one team or another. An example of how an imbalance could occur is if there is a strength differential between the two servers on one team. This seems to be the less-preferred solution by the USTA since service order is not preserved.

At the 2018 50+ NTRP Championship in Naples, there was a lot of controversy over the service order within doubles tie-breakers and umpires were witnessed to be inconsistently ruling on the order of precedence of both alternatives outlined above. The USTA and the NTRP National tournament organizers did a great disservice the umpires who were forced to make judgments in this situation. It is simply not the fault of the officials that the format is not clear. At a minimum the tournament should have published more complete guidance on how the sanctioning body discretionary items are to be imposed.

It gets worse. If a tie-breaker reaches a score of 4-4, a single “deciding point” is played to determine the winner of the set. It seems to be standard practice in the short tie-break to use a racquet spin to determine who serves the final deciding point, and this was the mechanism used at the NTRP Championships in 2018. The winner of the spin has the choice of whether to serve or receive. Changing sides is clearly not an allowable option, ironically the one useful thing that is derivable from the description of the short tiebreaker in the USTA Friend at Court.

The problem is that the order and precedence of the decisions is not specified. The team that wins the spin can elect to serve or receive. It is not clear if the serving team gets to make a decision on which partner will deliver the serve and when that decision would be made. It is also uncertain whether the team receiving has the option to determine which partner will receive the serve, but it seems to be a universal assumption that the receiving team does. Umpires were routinely hailed to courts in the middle of arguments along these lines. Rulings were inconsistent, again due to the lack of definition on the format rather than any fault of the officials.

The nature and order of these decisions can matter significantly. I personally observed a very real example of a deciding point fiasco in a men’s doubles match. In that case, the team that won the spin elected to receive because they were assuming that the player who had just double faulted from the other team would also be required to serve the next point. The serving team contended that they had the choice on which partner would serve, in this case opting for the player with a much more confident serve.

There was a long and protracted argument along what decisions could be made and in what order the decisions would occur. The umpire had no clue, again because there is no definitive description of the rule. This is a bad situation in any context. When coupled with the fact that the single deciding point that followed this lengthy debate was at a National Championship event, the effect is magnified.

While the order of serve issues do no impact singles to the same extent, when I was practicing the format for singles, we observed that there are scenarios where it would be advantageous to elect to change sides prior to the deciding point. This could be true for both singles and doubles.

Tennis Australia, the sanctioning body that has actually troubled themselves to publish Fast4 scoring rule and regulations, is considerably more verbose on the Fast4 tie-break topic:

In a FAST4 tie-break, the player/team who first wins five (5) points shall win the set, with a deciding point played at 4-4. The player whose turn it is to serve at the commencement of the tie-break (Player A) will serve two (2) points starting on the right half of the court. The opposing player (Player B) will then serve two (2) points starting on the right half of the court. Player A (or the partner, Player C, in doubles) will then serve two (2) points. Player B (or the partner, Player D, in doubles) will then serve the following two (2) points.

If the score reaches 4-4, Player B (or Player D in doubles) will serve the final point of the tie-break with the receiver(s) choosing whether to receive the serve from the right half or the left half of the court.

Players/Teams will only change ends after the first four (4) points.

2020 AR Tournaments Rules and Regulations, Rule 5a, Tennis Australia

Careful parsing of the Tennis Australia version of the rules reveals that for doubles, which of the two partners is player B and player D is not resolved. So there is still a lack of clarity in whether service order or service end is preserved for that team. The expanded Tennis Australia definition does clearly indicate that it is player D who serves the deciding point and the racquet spin is removed, so at least those ambiguities are resolved.

There is an easy fix for the issues with the “Short Set” tie-break format, which is to ditch it in favor of Coman played to 7 points. The “Short Set” and Fast4 tie-break rules are simply fundamentally flawed for doubles. The Coman tie-break format was designated as “experimental” for many years before being accepted by the players and the eventual removal of the experimental designation. It is unfortunate that the same wasn’t done for the Short-Set/Fast4 tie-break format because the flaws are apparent when it is actually played out.

As I officially bring the topic of a the short-set tiebreak to a close, I would also observe that all of the UTR tournaments that I have played in that use short sets still use the standard tie-break format first to to 7 points. Innovation is a good thing, but only if the innovation is actually good. The Short Set/Fast4 tie-break format is not good.

I am now confronted with the reality that I have one more footnote to make on Fast4. I will use an administrative slight of hand to place that topic into March, and thus preserve my promise that I am done with this topic for February.

1. United States Tennis Association (2020) Friend at Court. White Plains, NY
2. About NTRP National Championships, USTA, page viewed February 28, 2020.
3. 2020 Australian Ranking Tournament Rules and Regulations, Tennis Australia, December 21, 2019.