Rules in Playing Lawn Tennis
Lawn tennis is tennis played on a grass surface. The court dimensions for lawn tennis are the same as the dimensions for tennis played on other surfaces. The court is 78 feet long split in half by a net that is three feet high in the middle and raised at the outer edge 3 feet, 6 inches. The court is 27 feet wide (36 feet in doubles). Today, the most notable professional tennis tournament played on grass is Wimbledon in England.
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Opponents
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Lawn tennis is played in either a singles or doubles format. A singles format pits one player against the other. Doubles involves a team of two against another team of two. Competitively, lawn tennis is played based on men's singles and doubles, women's singles and doubles or mixed doubles where each team comprises one man and one woman. Opponents take turns serving (starting points), giving each side equal advantage of offense.
Scoring
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Lawn tennis is scored either in a best-of-three-set match or a best-of-five set match. Professional men's tennis can be a five-set duration as is done at Wimbledon, but most men's and all women's professional matches are in the best-of-three format.
A set is completed when one side wins six games before the other side, winning by two games. A tiebreaker (modified game) is played if teams win six apiece. The standard tiebreaker is referred to as a "12-point tiebreaker." The team or player that returned serve in the previous game will serve one point to start the tiebreaker with each player alternating two service points. The first team to seven, winning by two points, wins the tiebreaker and set.
Games are scored on a quarter basis with each game starting at 0-0. The first point is deemed 15, the second is 30, the third is 40. The player who wins the fourth point, with a margin of at least two, wins the game. If the game score reaches 40-40, this is called "deuce." A player must win two in a row from the point of deuce to win the game or the score reverts back to deuce again.
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Duration of Match
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Lawn tennis has no time limit or shot clock as other sports like basketball or football. Therefore, a tennis match can go on for hours. Most recently at Wimbledon, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a match of more than 11 hours spanning three days, the longest match in the recorded history of the sport. The only part of lawn tennis that is directed by a clock is the time between points and changeovers. Rule 29 of the International Tennis Federation rule book states that players have 20 seconds from when a point is completed to start the next point -- defined as either tossing the ball for a serve or standing to receive. Players change court sides after every odd-number game in a set. When they do they have 90 seconds to get water, sit down and rest before returning to the court. Players have a two-minute break between sets. Time penalties start with a warning, then a point is deducted, followed by a game.
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References
- Photo Credit tennis image by Christopher Walker from Fotolia.com
