Wimbledon Scoring Rules Explained for New Tennis Fans

The scoreboard on Centre Court shows a set of numbers that make almost no sense the first time you look at them. Someone is winning 40-30 in a game, 4-3 in a set, and one set to love in a match, and three different counting systems are running at once. None of the three works the way scoring works in any other British sport. Nothing accumulates, nothing carries over, and the player who has won the most points is under no obligation to be winning.

That last point is the one worth holding on to, because it explains why tennis matches turn the way they do. The scoring system deliberately throws away most of the information. It resets constantly, it discards the margin of victory in every unit it counts, and it makes some points enormously more valuable than others without ever telling you which ones. A player can win a hundred and twenty points to their opponent's hundred and lose in straight sets, and that is not an anomaly in the system. It is the system working as designed.

What follows is the whole apparatus, from a single point to a completed match, in the order you meet it while watching. The rules described here are the Rules of Tennis as published by the International Tennis Federation, modified by the Grand Slam Rule Book and by the All England Club's own conditions of entry where the Championships do something particular.

Points, games and sets: how a match stacks up

There are three nested units and each has its own finish line. Points build a game, games build a set, sets build a match. Winning any unit resets the one below it to zero.

A game is won by the first player to four points, provided they are two points clear. The points are called love, 15, 30, 40 and then game, so a player who wins four points without reply wins the game to love. If both players reach three points the score is deuce, and the game continues until someone wins two in a row.

A set is won by the first player to six games, provided they are two games clear. Six-four wins a set; six-five does not, and the set continues to seven-five or to six games all. At six all a tie break is played, and the winner of it takes the set seven-six.

A match is won by the first player to win the required number of sets. At Wimbledon that is three sets out of a possible five in the gentlemen's singles and gentlemen's doubles, and two sets out of a possible three in every other event.

• 4Points to win a game
• 6Games to win a set
• 3Sets to win the gentlemen's singles

The minimum required to win each unit, assuming no deuce and no tie break. Each figure can rise if the score reaches deuce or six games all.

The crucial mechanic is the reset. If a player loses a game 40-0 having led earlier, none of the points they won in it are recorded anywhere. If they lose a set 7-5 after leading 5-2, the set counts exactly the same as a 6-0 defeat. This is what makes momentum in tennis real rather than sentimental: a player who is being outplayed can survive one bad game with no lasting cost, and a player who is dominating can go three-quarters of an hour without anything to show for it.

The corollary is that the difficulty of a point varies wildly. A point at 40-0 is nearly worthless to the leader and almost worthless to the trailer. A point at deuce in a game that would decide the set is worth an enormous amount to both. Players who understand this distribute their risk accordingly, going for more on cheap points and playing percentages on expensive ones, which is why a serve-and-volley player will sometimes attack a second serve at 30-0 and never at 30-40.

Where 15, 30 and 40 came from

Nobody knows for certain, and anyone who tells you the answer with confidence is going beyond what the sources support. Three explanations circulate, and they are not equally good.

The most repeated is the clock face. On this account the points were originally quarters of an hour, marked on a clock dial as the game progressed, giving 15, 30, 45 and then a return to the top for game. The 45 was shortened to 40 because it is quicker to call. It is a tidy story and it may well be right about the shortening of 45 to 40, which does appear in the historical record. The weakness is chronology: the scoring terms appear in French sources describing jeu de paume, the indoor handball ancestor of tennis, before clock faces with minute hands were commonplace enough to serve as a public scoreboard.

The second explanation runs through the sixty-unit systems that medieval French counting used for a great many things, from currency to angles. If a game is a unit of sixty, quartering it produces 15, 30, 45 and 60 without any clock being involved. This is the version most etymologists find plausible.

The third involves gambling. Jeu de paume was played for stakes, and a version of this theory has the stake rising in units of fifteen deniers per point. The evidence is thin, but the general observation underlying it is sound: the game was gambled on heavily, and scoring conventions in gambled games often follow the money rather than the play.

What is beyond dispute is that the terms arrived in English from French along with the game itself, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and that they had already been in use for a long time before lawn tennis was invented in the 1870s. When the All England Club codified the Championships in 1877 it inherited a scoring vocabulary several centuries old and left it alone, which is why a modern tennis scoreboard is one of the last places in British public life where a medieval French counting convention is still in daily use.

Love, deuce and advantage

Love means zero. The best-supported derivation is from the English phrase to do something for love, meaning to do it for nothing, which is exactly what a player with no points has been playing for. The alternative that everyone repeats, that it comes from the French l'oeuf, an egg, on the grounds that a nought is egg-shaped, is charming and poorly evidenced. English uses the same egg-shaped-nought metaphor in the cricketing duck, so the idea is not absurd; there is simply no trail of usage connecting l'oeuf to tennis in the way there is for the for-nothing sense.

Deuce is on firmer ground. It comes from the French phrase à deux le jeu, or a version of it, meaning that two points are needed to take the game. At deuce both players have won three points, the four-point target has failed to separate them, and the rule changes: from here the game goes to whoever wins two consecutive points.

Advantage, usually called out as advantage followed by the player's name, is the intermediate state. Win a point from deuce and you have advantage. Win the next and the game is yours. Lose it and the score returns to deuce, and the whole loop begins again.

1. 1Love-allNobody has won a point. The server is about to deliver the first ball of the game.
2. 215, 30, 40Each point won moves the score along one step. The server's score is always called first.
3. 3Game to love, 15 or 30If a player reaches four points while at least two clear, the game ends here.
4. 4DeuceBoth players have three points. The four-point rule no longer applies and two clear points are now required.
5. 5AdvantageOne player has won a point from deuce and is one point from the game.
6. 6Back to deuceThe other player wins the next point and the score returns to level. The loop repeats until someone wins two in a row.

The sequence of states a game passes through. The deuce loop can repeat any number of times.

There is no limit on how long a deuce game can run. Long games are exhausting out of proportion to their value, because they are worth exactly one game whether they last four points or forty, and a player who has spent twelve minutes holding serve from 0-40 has often paid more for it than the game is worth. Watch what happens in the following game and you will frequently see why coaches talk about the game after the long game.

Some competitions use a shortened alternative called no-advantage scoring, in which deuce is followed by a single deciding point rather than a two-point run. The professional tours use it in doubles. The Championships have kept traditional advantage scoring in the singles, which is one of several places where Wimbledon sits at the conservative end of the sport, a pattern our page on how Wimbledon differs from the other Grand Slams sets out in full.

Best of five and best of three at the Championships

The gentlemen's singles is played over the best of five sets throughout, from the first round to the final. The ladies' singles is best of three throughout. The gentlemen's doubles at Wimbledon is best of five, which is unusual and makes it one of the longest events in the sport; the ladies' doubles and the mixed doubles are best of three.

Gentlemen's singles3sets

Gentlemen's doubles3sets

Ladies' singles2sets

Ladies' doubles2sets

Mixed doubles2sets

The number of sets a side must win, not the maximum number played. A best-of-five match requires three sets and a best-of-three requires two.

Show the numbers

Sets required to win a match, by event

Item	Value
Gentlemen's singles	3sets
Gentlemen's doubles	3sets
Ladies' singles	2sets
Ladies' doubles	2sets
Mixed doubles	2sets

The practical consequence of best-of-five is that it is much harder to win on a single good hour. A player who takes the first two sets against a stronger opponent still has to find a third, and the extra sets give the better player more chances for their advantage to assert itself. Comebacks from two sets down happen every year at Wimbledon, and they are essentially impossible in a best-of-three format, where two sets down is the end of the match.

Best-of-five also interacts with the daily schedule in ways that catch spectators out. A five-set men's match can run past four hours, which pushes everything behind it back, and the Championships operate under a local planning condition that stops play at 11pm. Our guide to the Wimbledon curfew explains what happens when a fifth set collides with it, and the order of play page covers how the referee tries to avoid the collision in the first place.

The question of whether women should also play five sets recurs regularly and has no settled answer. The arguments run both ways, and both sides have a point: equal formats would be symmetrical, while the current arrangement reflects a scheduling reality in which the women's draw shares courts with the men's and the tournament has a fixed number of days. It is a genuine open question rather than a solved one.

Serving order, ends and when players sit down

A coin toss, or a racket spin, decides the first choice. The winner chooses to serve, to receive, or to take a particular end, and the loser takes what is left. A player who elects to receive is making a bet that they can break early, which is rare but not unknown.

Service alternates by game. Whoever serves the first game receives in the second, and so on for the rest of the set. Within a game, the server delivers from the right of the centre mark on even-numbered point totals and from the left on odd ones, so the first point of every game is served from the right court and every point after a change of side alternates.

Ends change after the first game of each set and then after every second game thereafter, which means after the odd-numbered games. There is a reason for that odd-sounding rule: it stops one player spending a disproportionate share of the match with the sun or the wind at their back. At the end of a set, the players change ends only if the total number of games played in that set was odd.

Moment	Players change ends	Players may sit	Time allowed
After game 1 of a set	Yes	No	Immediate crossover
After every odd game thereafter	Yes	Yes	90 seconds
End of a set, odd total games	Yes	Yes	120 seconds
End of a set, even total games	No	Yes	120 seconds
Every six points in a tie break	Yes	No	Immediate crossover

The ninety-second changeover and the two-minute set break are the only scheduled rests in a match. Between points, players have twenty-five seconds at the Grand Slams, enforced by a visible serve clock, and a first breach usually produces a warning while later ones cost a fault or a point depending on where in the sequence the offence falls. Sitting down after the first game of a set is not allowed, which is why you see players cross, take a drink standing, and go straight back out.

Break points, set points and championship points

Serving is an advantage. The server chooses where the ball starts, gets two attempts at it, and can win points outright with a delivery the receiver never touches. At the top of the men's game a hold of serve is the expected outcome of a game, which is precisely what makes a break of serve so decisive.

A break point is any point on which the receiver can win the game. If the receiver leads 0-40 they hold three break points; at 30-40 they hold one; at advantage-receiver they hold one. The corresponding term for the server in that position is a game point.

A set point is any point on which a player can win the set, and a match point any point on which they can win the match. On finals day the commentator will say championship point instead of match point, which is a Wimbledon habit rather than a rule.

The arithmetic of a set explains why breaks matter so much. To win a set 6-4 without breaking serve is impossible; someone must lose a service game somewhere, or the set goes to a tie break. So a single break in a set is often the whole story of that set, and a player who is broken once and never breaks back will lose it, however well they served in their other five games. Statistics such as break points converted are more informative about a match than aces or winners for exactly this reason.

Holding, breaking and serving for the set

Serving for the set is its own particular pressure, and the phrase serving to stay in the set describes the other half of it. A player at 5-4 up serving needs four points to end it; their opponent needs to hold serve twice more just to reach a tie break. The receiver at that moment has nothing to lose, which is one reason breaks at 5-4 are commoner than the raw hold percentages would suggest.

How tie breaks slot into the scoring system

At six games all, the set is decided by a tie break, which uses ordinary numbers rather than the 15-30-40 sequence. The first player to seven points wins it, provided they are two points clear; if the score reaches six all, play continues until somebody leads by two.

1. 1First pointThe player whose turn it is to serve delivers one point only, from the right court.
2. 2Points two and threeThe opponent serves two points, starting from the left court.
3. 3Every pair after thatService alternates in blocks of two, so each player always serves one point from each side.
4. 4After every six pointsThe players change ends without sitting down, then play resumes immediately.
5. 5Seven points, two clearThe tie break, and the set, ends. The set is recorded as seven games to six.
6. 6Six points all or beyondPlay continues, alternating in pairs, until one player leads by two points.

The order of service and the changeover points. The same rotation applies to the longer final-set tie break.

Whoever served first in the tie break receives first in the next set, which keeps the alternation intact across the set boundary. That detail is easy to miss and is the most common source of confusion about who is serving after a tie break has finished.

The final set is the exception. Wimbledon played advantage final sets, with no tie break at all, for most of its history, which produced the 2010 first-round match in which John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth over three days and eleven hours and five minutes of play, and the 2018 semi-final in which Kevin Anderson beat Isner 26-24. Wimbledon introduced a final-set tie break at twelve games all in 2019, and from 2022 all four Grand Slams harmonised on the same rule: at six games all in the final set, a tie break played to ten points rather than seven. The reasoning, the history and the arithmetic are set out in detail in our guide to Wimbledon tie break rules.

Lets, faults and double faults on the serve

The server gets two attempts at each point. A serve that lands outside the correct service box, that hits the net and fails to land in, or that is delivered while the server's foot is touching or crossing the baseline is a fault. A second fault is a double fault and the point goes to the receiver immediately.

A let is different from a fault. If the serve clips the net cord and still lands in the correct service box, it is a let and the serve is taken again, with no penalty and no loss of an attempt. A first serve that clips and lands in is replayed as a first serve. A let can also be called for any interference: a ball rolling on from another court, a spectator shouting during the delivery, a player unready when the serve is struck.

Foot faults are called on the line, and they are the least popular call in tennis because they interrupt a point that would otherwise have been played. The rule exists because standing inside the baseline shortens the distance the ball has to travel and changes the geometry of the serve.

Wimbledon has moved to live electronic line calling, which replaced the human line judges who had stood at the ends and sides of the courts for the whole history of the tournament. The technology calls in and out automatically and announces the result, which removes the challenge system that had run since Hawk-Eye reviews were introduced. Net-cord detection is handled by a sensor on the net rather than by an official with a hand on the cord. Our page on electronic line calling at Wimbledon covers what changed and what it means for the way a point ends.

Reading a Wimbledon scoreboard and the statistics panel

The layout is consistent across the grounds and on the television graphic. Player names run down the left. To the right of each name are the completed set scores in order, and then, in a separate column, the score in the game currently being played. A marker beside one name shows who is serving.

Completed tie break sets carry a small figure alongside the games score, showing the points won in the tie break by the loser of it. A set shown as 7-6 with a small 4 next to the 6 means the tie break finished seven points to four.

Element	What it shows
Left column	Player or pair names, seed number in brackets if seeded
Middle columns	Completed sets, in the order they were played
Superscript figure	The losing score in a tie break for that set
Right column	The current game score, in the 15-30-40 sequence
Serve indicator	A dot or ball symbol against the server's name

The statistics panel is where a match becomes legible. Aces and double faults are self-explanatory. First serve percentage is how often a player got a first serve in play, and it is nearly always more useful alongside first serve points won, because a high percentage achieved by serving softly is worth very little. Break points converted, shown as a ratio, is the single most predictive number on the panel.

Winners and unforced errors are the pair to treat with caution, because the distinction between an unforced error and a forced one is a judgement made by a statistician in real time, not a fact. Two people scoring the same match will not produce identical numbers. Total points won is worth a glance at the end of a close match for the pleasure of seeing how often the loser has the larger figure.

Retirements, walkovers and defaults

Three different things can end a match without a final point being played, and they are recorded differently.

A retirement happens when a player who has started the match is unable to continue, usually through injury or illness. The match is recorded with the score as it stood at the moment of retirement, followed by the abbreviation ret., and the opponent advances. Points and games already won are not wiped out; the scoreline stands as a partial record.

A walkover happens before the match begins. A player withdraws, the opponent advances without hitting a ball, and no score is recorded at all. Walkovers are shown as w/o. The distinction matters for prize money and ranking points, which are handled by different rules at Grand Slams and on the tours, and those rules have been amended more than once, so the current provisions are worth checking against the relevant rulebook rather than assumed.

A default is imposed rather than chosen. The Point Penalty System runs in escalating steps: a code violation produces a warning for the first offence, the loss of a point for the second, the loss of a game for the third, and referral to the referee thereafter, who may default the player. Certain acts are serious enough to bypass the ladder entirely and produce an immediate default, the standard example being a ball struck in anger that hits an official. Defaults are rare and they are always contentious, which is exactly why the graduated system exists.

Rain does not end a match; it suspends it. Play resumes from the identical score, on the same court where possible, and the rules on when a match may be moved or resumed under a roof are more involved than they look. Our page on Wimbledon rain delay rules goes through them.

Scoring quirks in doubles and mixed doubles

Doubles uses the same points, games and sets, with several extra rules governing order, and those rules are the source of most of the confusion in a doubles match.

At the start of each set, the serving side decides which of the two partners will serve first. The receiving side decides which partner will receive in the right court and which in the left. Both orders are then fixed for the whole set. A player who has taken the right court receives every point served to the right court in that set, and cannot swap with their partner mid-set. Both orders may be changed at the start of the next set.

Service rotates through all four players in turn: side A's first server, side B's first server, side A's second server, side B's second server, and back round. That means each player serves every fourth game. In a tie break the same rotation continues, with each player serving in the established order.

If a side receives out of turn, the error stands for the remainder of that game and the correct order resumes afterwards. If a player serves out of turn, the mistake is corrected as soon as it is discovered, and points already played stand. Officials handle this calmly because it happens more often than you would think, particularly after a long changeover.

The server's partner may stand anywhere, on or off the court, including in the tramlines or behind the server. The receiver's partner may do the same. The convention of standing at the net, close to the centre, is tactical rather than required, and pairs that poach aggressively vary it deliberately.

The professional tours use shortened formats in doubles, with no-advantage scoring at deuce and a ten-point match tie break in place of a deciding set. Grand Slam doubles have generally retained traditional scoring, and the Championships' own conditions of entry are the place to confirm what applies in a given event, because these provisions have been altered more than once in recent years and the four majors have not always moved together. The draw sizes, seeding and entry rules for the doubles events are covered separately in our guide to the Wimbledon doubles draws, and the seeding arithmetic that shapes both singles and doubles brackets is explained in how Wimbledon seeding works.

Mixed doubles adds one further wrinkle that has nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with tactics: the serve is delivered to a man in one court and a woman in the other, and the difference in the returns that come back shapes how each side constructs points. It is the most tactically strange event at the Championships and, for a spectator learning the scoring, one of the easiest to follow, because the pattern of who serves to whom repeats visibly every four games. If you want the rest of the sport in this country rather than just the fortnight, our tennis section is the place to start.