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Appreciating Tennis

I've recently been watching the Australian Open tennis tournament, particularly late at night after work when I'm trying to relax. Well, relaxing it has been. I haven't traditionally been into watching tennis, but have definitely been immensely enjoying taking in both the women's and men's sides of the bracket. There's just something about the monotonous back and forth of the tennis ball hit across the net that's a good decompressing activity for me, and tennis players really are world class athletes. I was surprised when I looked up the earnings and net worths of several tennis players, the numbers are huge and he sponsorships are lucrative. Clearly, many people around the globe enjoy watching this sport as much as I do (and most likely a lot more).

The simplicity of the scoring system of tennis is one of the things that I enjoy the most. In tennis, you have to win 4 points to win a game. 6 games won gets you a set. And you have to win 3 sets of 5 to win the match (2 of 3 for women). However, the difficulty of tennis comes into play when you realize that you always have to win a game or set by two points to beat the other person. So games can go on super long if both players keep scoring back and forth and can't gain more than a 1 point advantages, and sets can go seemingly forever becuase of the tiebreaker that can occur if the set ends 6-6. Wimbledon up until recent years did not havea tiebreak in the 5th set of men's matches, so there have been several epic long matches in the storied tournament's history, including the longest tennis match in history between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. The match lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes and took place over the course of 3 days because of a final set that ended in a score of 70-68 games, eventually won by the American Isner.