Indian Wells Tennis Tournament: Format, Venue and History
The Indian Wells tennis tournament in California explained: 96-player draws, the 16,100-seat Stadium 1, desert conditions and the fifth Grand Slam tag.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished US Open & American Tennis22 min read
- Venue
- Indian Wells Tennis Garden, California
- Stadium 1 seats
- 16,100
- Singles draw, men and women
- 96
- Points to each singles champion
- 1,000
In March 2022, Taylor Fritz beat Rafael Nadal in the final at Indian Wells and became the first American man to win the title since Andre Agassi in 2001. He had nearly withdrawn that morning with an ankle injury, and he played the final in front of a full Stadium 1 that was, for once, almost entirely on the side of the man from Southern California.
The Indian Wells tennis tournament, sponsored as the BNP Paribas Open, is a combined men's and women's event held every March at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in the Coachella Valley of Southern California. The men's event is an ATP Masters 1000 and the women's event is a WTA 1000, the highest tier below the four Grand Slams on each tour. Both singles draws have 96 players, the 32 seeds receive first-round byes, and each singles champion earns 1,000 ranking points over close to two weeks of play.
The Indian Wells tennis tournament in one paragraph
The event belongs to a small group of combined tournaments that run the men's and women's competitions side by side, on the same courts, for the same length of time. Indian Wells and Miami, played back to back each spring, are among the biggest outside the Grand Slams, and the American spring would not look the same without them.
- 16100Seats in Stadium 1
- 96Players in each singles draw
- 32Seeds with first-round byes
- 1000Ranking points for each singles champion
Fixed features of the event's format and venue; prize money and attendance change every year and are not shown.
What sets it apart is concentration. Almost every top player in both tours is there. The venue was built for tennis rather than adapted to it. The calendar puts it at a point where the season is still young and players are rested. And it is far from any major city, which gives it a resort atmosphere that players often say they enjoy.
The venue is in the city of Indian Wells, one of a string of resort towns that stretch along the Coachella Valley from Palm Springs. The courts sit in a landscape of date palms, golf courses and the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, and the weather in March is usually warm and dry during the day.
The tournament also matters for American tennis in a particular way. It is one of the few places outside the US Open where American players compete at the top level in front of home crowds, and the men's and women's fields together bring most of the world's best players to the West Coast for nearly two weeks.
The 96-player draw: 32 seeds, first-round byes and seven rounds
Most professional tournaments use a draw that is a power of two: 32, 64 or 128. Indian Wells uses 96, which is not. It works because the 32 seeded players skip the first round.
In the first round, the 64 unseeded players play each other: direct entries ranked below the seeds, qualifiers who came through a preliminary qualifying draw, and wild cards granted by the tournament. The 32 winners join the 32 seeds in the second round, which is a conventional 64-player draw. From there the competition runs down like any knockout tournament.
| Round | Players | Who is in it |
|---|---|---|
| First round | 64 | Unseeded direct entries, qualifiers and wild cards |
| Second round | 64 | The 32 first-round winners and the 32 seeds |
| Third round | 32 | Second-round winners |
| Fourth round | 16 | Third-round winners |
| Quarterfinals | 8 | Fourth-round winners |
| Semifinals | 4 | Quarterfinal winners |
| Final | 2 | Semifinal winners |
An unseeded player must win seven matches to take the title. A seeded player needs six. That extra match is not trivial, especially in the desert heat of a long tournament, and it is part of what makes an unseeded champion such as Bianca Andreescu in 2019 notable.
- EntryThe player gets in through ranking, qualifying or a wild card and is placed in the first round.
- First roundSixty-four unseeded players meet, and the 32 winners advance.
- Second roundThe winners meet the 32 seeds in a full 64-player round.
- Middle roundsThird and fourth rounds cut the field to eight quarterfinalists.
- Last four matchesQuarterfinal, semifinal and final, usually across the second weekend.
The sequence for any player who does not receive a seed; seeds enter at the second round and need six wins.
The length of the event
A 96-player draw takes time to play through. The tournament runs for close to two weeks, with qualifying at the start. Singles matches are best of three sets, as at every ATP and WTA event outside the Grand Slams, with a tiebreak at six games all in every set.
The 96 format also gives fans more matches. In the first few days, the grounds are full of players on outside courts, and the two-week schedule means a spectator can see early-round matches of top players and the later rounds in Stadium 1 on separate trips.
Stadium 1, Stadium 2 and grounds built for watching practice
The Indian Wells Tennis Garden opened in 2000. Its main court, Stadium 1, seats 16,100, which makes it the second-largest tennis stadium in the world. Only Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, covered in our guide to Arthur Ashe Stadium, is bigger.
Stadium 1 is an open bowl with no roof. The desert rarely needs one: rain at Indian Wells in March is unusual, though not impossible, and when it comes, play stops. The stadium has seats rising steeply from the court, with suites and restaurants built into the upper levels.
Stadium 2
A second permanent show court, Stadium 2, was added in the Ellison era described below. It is much smaller than Stadium 1, and its design put a restaurant into the stands overlooking the court, so diners can watch play during a meal. Several other courts with stands make up the rest of the match courts, along with outer courts that have little seating beyond bleachers.
Practice courts as a spectator draw
Indian Wells is unusual in how deliberately it shows off practice. Large banks of practice courts sit within the grounds, with seating and viewing areas around them, and fans can watch top players hit before their matches at close range. During the first week, when the grounds are busiest, the practice courts can draw crowds that rival those on some match courts.
It reads as a design choice rather than an accident. A venue built from scratch for one tournament could place its practice courts where crowds would pass them, an option older sites squeezed into city parks or club grounds never had.
The grounds are spread out and open, with wide walkways, grass areas, food courts and shade structures, and the whole site is landscaped to feel like a resort rather than a stadium complex. It takes time to walk from one end to the other.
Desert conditions: dry air, a gritty court and cold nights
Indian Wells plays unlike most hard-court events, and the reasons are in the weather and the court.
The Coachella Valley is not high. Much of the valley floor sits close to sea level, and parts of it are below. What players notice is the warm, dry desert air, in which they regularly describe the ball as flying. The usual explanation is heat and dryness together; the physics is less tidy than the folklore, since dry air is not thinner than humid air at the same temperature, but the effect on court is consistent enough that almost every player mentions it. Shots that would land inside the baseline elsewhere sail long. Players often need a few days to adjust their timing.
The gritty court
The court surface works in the other direction. The acrylic hard courts at Indian Wells have a gritty, sandy top coat that grips the ball on the bounce, slowing it and kicking it up. The result is a court that plays slower and bouncier than most hard courts, which players describe as one of the slowest on the tours.
The combination is distinctive. The ball travels quickly through the air and then slows sharply after it lands. That rewards players who generate heavy topspin, which kicks the ball up off the court, and it gives defensive players more time to reach shots. Big servers find their serves less effective than on faster hard courts. It is one reason players who are comfortable on clay tend to settle quickly here, and why the venue suits those who build points patiently.
How hard courts differ from each other, and how a court's pace is measured, is explained in our guide to hard-court tennis, and our page on the US Open court surface shows how differently the hard courts in New York are set up.
Heat, cold and wind
Daytime temperatures in March are warm, sometimes hot, and the sun is strong. In the evening, the desert cools quickly. Night sessions can be cold, and players who started a match in sunshine sometimes finish it in a chill that changes how the ball behaves: cooler, denser air drags on the ball and slows it.
The wind is the other factor. Afternoon winds are common in the valley, and they can make conditions difficult, especially on the open courts. A player who wins a morning match in calm conditions may play the next round in a stiff breeze.
How players adjust in the desert
The first few days at Indian Wells are partly a calibration exercise. Players arriving from the February events have to rein in a ball that carries further than it did a week earlier, and the usual tools are the ones they control. Some string their rackets tighter to take a little power off the shot. Others add more topspin, which brings the ball down inside the baseline and, on this court, kicks it up toward an opponent's shoulder.
Returners tend to stand deeper than they would on a fast court, because the bounce comes up high and the slow surface gives them time. That in turn blunts the serve, and a player who relies on free points behind a big first delivery finds rallies lasting longer than they would like. Tactically, the desert asks for patience in the rally and precision with depth, not the first-strike tennis that wins on quicker hard courts.
The practice courts are where much of this adjustment happens, which is one reason they are worth watching in the first days of the event.
Why players and fans call Indian Wells the fifth Grand Slam
The phrase gets used every March. It has no official meaning.
The case for it rests on three things. The fields are as strong as a Grand Slam's at the top, because almost every leading player enters, and the 96-player draws make it bigger than most events outside the majors. The facilities are among the best in the sport, with a purpose-built venue, the second-largest stadium in tennis and extensive practice courts. And the attendance over the full event is among the largest of any tennis tournament outside the four majors.
Why the label carries no official status
The Grand Slams are defined by history and by the governing structure of the sport. The four majors, the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, sit outside the tours' own tier systems, award 2,000 ranking points to their champions and play men's singles at best of five sets. Indian Wells awards 1,000 points, plays best of three, and sits within the ATP and WTA calendars as one of their top-tier events.
No ranking system, governing body or record book treats Indian Wells as a major. A player who wins it does not add to their Grand Slam total. Several other tournaments have been called the fifth Grand Slam at various times, including Miami, and golf hands a near-identical title, the fifth major, to the Players Championship, which shows how loose the phrase is.
The label does reflect something real. Indian Wells is at or near the top of the tier below the Grand Slams, and many players say it is one of their favorite events of the season. Calling it the fifth Grand Slam is a compliment, not a classification.
What a major has that Indian Wells does not
Set the two side by side and the gaps are concrete. A Grand Slam singles draw has 128 players, not 96, so an unseeded champion wins seven matches there as at Indian Wells, but every player, seeded or not, starts in the first round. Men's singles at a major is best of five sets, which changes how a player paces a match and a fortnight. The majors also run junior, wheelchair and mixed doubles events and a qualifying competition of their own that is itself a large tournament.
None of that makes Indian Wells a lesser event in the eyes of the players who win it. It makes it a different kind of event: shorter matches, a smaller draw and a single tier of ranking points, packed into a venue that can match the majors on comfort and, at the top of the draw, on quality.
Ranking points and the place of Indian Wells in the calendar
Each singles champion at Indian Wells earns 1,000 ranking points. That is half of what a Grand Slam champion earns and double what a champion earns at an event in the next tier down.
Points for earlier rounds scale down from there. How those points add up into a ranking, and how long they count, is set out in our explainer on how ATP and WTA rankings work.
Mandatory entry
The men's and women's tours both require their leading players to enter their top-tier events. On the ATP side, players with high enough rankings are committed to play the Masters 1000 events, and missing one without a valid reason can cost them ranking points. On the WTA side, Indian Wells is one of the mandatory WTA 1000 events. In practice, this is why the fields at Indian Wells look so complete: the leading players are obliged to be there.
Where it sits in the season
For men, Indian Wells is the first Masters 1000 event of the year. It comes after the Australian Open in January and a run of smaller events in February in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. For women, it follows WTA 1000 events in the Middle East in February.
Either way, Indian Wells is the first big stop in North America and the start of the March swing that continues to Miami. The hard-court season then gives way to clay in April. The next long run of American hard-court events comes in the summer, which is covered in our guide to the US Open Series.
The Sunshine Double: winning Indian Wells and Miami back to back
Winning Indian Wells and Miami in the same year is known as the Sunshine Double. It is one of the hardest achievements in tennis outside the Grand Slams.
The two events are played back to back, Indian Wells in March and Miami running from late March into early April, and they are very different. Indian Wells is dry and slow, with a ball that flies through the air. Miami, covered in our guide to the Miami Open, is humid and sea-level, played on a court that is generally regarded as faster. A player who adapts to one has only a few days to adapt to the other, after close to two weeks of matches in the desert.
| Player | Tour | Year or years of the double |
|---|---|---|
| Jim Courier | ATP | 1991 |
| Michael Chang | ATP | 1992 |
| Pete Sampras | ATP | 1994 |
| Marcelo Ríos | ATP | 1998 |
| Andre Agassi | ATP | 2001 |
| Roger Federer | ATP | 2005, 2006, 2017 |
| Novak Djokovic | ATP | 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 |
| Steffi Graf | WTA | 1994, 1996 |
| Kim Clijsters | WTA | 2005 |
| Victoria Azarenka | WTA | 2016 |
| Iga Świątek | WTA | 2022 |
The list above runs through 2025. Djokovic did it three years in a row, from 2014 to 2016, a run no one else has matched. On the women's side the double has been rarer, and several dominant champions, including Serena Williams in her peak years, never achieved it, partly because Williams did not play Indian Wells for more than a decade.
Why it is so rare
The physical load is part of it. Each event takes close to two weeks, with best-of-three-set matches in heat and, in Miami, humidity. Winning both means winning roughly a dozen matches in four weeks across two very different sets of conditions. The difference in conditions is the other part. A player whose game suits the desert does not necessarily suit Miami, and vice versa.
Indian Wells record holders: five-time champions and teenagers who announced themselves
Two men have won the singles title five times, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. Their totals, and those of other multiple champions, are below through the 2025 tournament; the numbers change as new titles are won.
| Player | Titles at Indian Wells | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Novak Djokovic | 5 | 2008, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 |
| Roger Federer | 5 | 2004, 2005, 2006, 2012, 2017 |
| Rafael Nadal | 3 | 2007, 2009, 2013 |
| Carlos Alcaraz | 2 | 2023, 2024 |
| Iga Świątek | 2 | 2022, 2024 |
| Victoria Azarenka | 2 | 2012, 2016 |
| Maria Sharapova | 2 | 2006, 2013 |
| Kim Clijsters | 2 | 2003, 2005 |
| Daniela Hantuchová | 2 | 2002, 2007 |
| Serena Williams | 2 | 1999, 2001 |
The table is a selection rather than a complete list of every multiple champion in the tournament's history, which runs back to the 1970s on the men's side.
The teenagers
Indian Wells has a record of producing young champions who went on to bigger things. Serena Williams won her first title here in 1999 at 17. Bianca Andreescu won in 2019 at 18, entering as a wild card, and later that year won the US Open. Carlos Alcaraz won in 2023 at 19 and returned to No. 1 in the rankings with the title. Mirra Andreeva won in 2025 at 17, beating the world No. 1, Aryna Sabalenka, in the final.
The slow court partly explains it. A slow, high-bouncing court gives a young player time to set up, and it rewards fitness and consistency over the experience needed to handle a big serve on a fast surface.
The Williams boycott
The tournament's most difficult chapter came in 2001. Venus Williams withdrew from her semifinal against her sister Serena shortly before the match, citing injury. When Serena played the final against Kim Clijsters, she was booed by sections of the crowd, and the Williams family later said the treatment included racist abuse. Both sisters stayed away for more than a decade. Serena returned in 2015, and Venus returned in 2016. The episode is part of the tournament's history and of the wider story of American tennis, and it is why, for all the sisters' success, Serena's titles in 1999 and 2001 remain the family's only Indian Wells singles titles.
From Tucson to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden
The tournament's history is more complicated than its current setting suggests.
The men's event traces its lineage to a tournament founded in the mid-1970s in Tucson, Arizona. It moved to the Palm Springs area later in the decade and passed through several resort venues in the Coachella Valley before settling in Indian Wells. A women's event joined in the late 1980s, and the two were combined into a single event in the 1990s.
The figure most associated with that growth is Charlie Pasarell, a Puerto Rican former player who won the NCAA singles title at UCLA and later ran the tournament with his business partners. Pasarell's ambition was a venue built specifically for the event, rather than courts rented at a resort.
The Tennis Garden
That ambition produced the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, which opened in 2000. It was built for tennis from the ground up, with the 16,100-seat Stadium 1, outside courts and practice courts arranged around it, on a large site in the city of Indian Wells. It gave the tournament a home that matched its ambitions, and it set a standard that later venues were measured against.
Building it was expensive, and the tournament's finances were under strain in the years that followed, with its long-term future in question by the end of the decade.
The Larry Ellison years: technology, a second stadium and private money
In 2009 Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, bought the tournament and the Tennis Garden. It was an unusual purchase: a top-tier professional tennis event owned by a single private individual rather than a national federation, a tour or a sports company.
Ellison's ownership changed the tournament's finances and its facilities. The private money paid for a series of improvements that would have been hard to finance otherwise.
Electronic line-calling on every court
One of the most visible changes was technology. Indian Wells became one of the first tournaments to put electronic line-calling on every match court, so that players on outer courts had the same access to Hawk-Eye challenges as those in Stadium 1. The ATP has since moved to electronic line calling across its events, from 2025, but Indian Wells was ahead of that change by years. How the system tracks the ball and decides whether it was in is covered in our explainer on how Hawk-Eye works.
Stadium 2 and the grounds
The second permanent stadium, Stadium 2, was added in this period, along with new restaurants, expanded practice areas and improvements across the grounds. The tournament invested in the experience of being there, not only in the tennis, and the venue's reputation among players and fans has risen with it.
The canceled year and the October edition
Ellison's ownership also covered the tournament's strangest stretch. In March 2020 the event was called off on the eve of the main draw as the coronavirus spread, one of the first major sporting events in the United States to be canceled. The following year it moved out of its March slot altogether and was played in October 2021, when Cameron Norrie and Paula Badosa won the singles titles in cooler autumn conditions that played differently from the usual spring desert. The tournament returned to March in 2022.
What private ownership means
Private ownership is a mixed blessing in principle, since a tournament's future depends on one owner's commitment. At Indian Wells, it has been overwhelmingly positive for the event, the players and the fans. The tournament's standing in the sport today owes much to the investment of the Ellison era.
The doubles at Indian Wells and why singles stars enter it
Indian Wells runs men's and women's doubles events alongside the singles. Mixed doubles, a fixture of the Grand Slams, is not part of the ATP and WTA program here.
The doubles events attract an unusual number of top singles players, and there are reasons for that. The 96-player singles draws, with first-round byes for seeds, leave room in the schedule early in the tournament. Doubles gives players match practice in the desert conditions, which take time to adjust to, without the physical cost of extra singles. And the prize money and points on offer at a 1,000-level event make the doubles worth playing.
Rafael Nadal is one example. He and Marc López, his friend and countryman, won the men's doubles title at Indian Wells, a result that showed how seriously some singles stars took the event.
Why it is good for the tournament
For fans, top singles players in doubles mean more chances to see the stars, often on smaller courts at close range. For the tournament, it means a stronger doubles event that draws crowds rather than playing to empty seats. For doubles specialists, it is a mixed blessing: they face tougher competition, but the event gets more attention.
How the doubles is played
Tour-level doubles follows the ATP and WTA format rather than the singles one. Every game is played no-ad, so a game at deuce goes to one deciding point with the receiving team choosing which player returns. Sets are played to six with a tiebreak at six-all, and if the pairs split the first two sets, a 10-point match tiebreak replaces the third. The doubles draws are much smaller than the singles fields, which keeps the event inside the same fortnight.
That short format is one reason singles players are willing to enter. A doubles match under these rules rarely runs long, and a pair of singles stars who lose early have spent little energy doing it. A pair who keep winning can find themselves playing doubles in the evening after a singles match in the afternoon, and in the second week the schedulers have to fit both around each other.
The rules of doubles, including the no-ad scoring and match tiebreak used at tour level, are set out in our guide to college tennis scoring rules, which explains how no-ad works in detail.
Going to the Indian Wells tennis tournament: sessions, heat and grounds passes
Indian Wells is in the Palm Springs area, about two hours or more by car from Los Angeles depending on traffic. Palm Springs International Airport is the nearest commercial airport. Many visitors stay in Palm Springs, Palm Desert, La Quinta or Indian Wells itself.
The tournament is split into day and night sessions. Day sessions start in the late morning and run through the afternoon, with matches on all courts. Night sessions are held in Stadium 1, usually featuring top players. A ticket to Stadium 1 is generally tied to a specific session.
Heat and shade
The desert sun is strong even in March. Sunscreen, a hat and water are essential, and the grounds have shade structures and misting systems in places. Stadium 1 is open to the sky, and seats in the sun can be uncomfortable during day sessions. The evening cools quickly, so a jacket for a night session is wise.
What a grounds pass lets you see
A grounds pass, the cheapest ticket, gives access to the grounds and to the outer courts, practice courts and the food and shopping areas. During the first week, when the outer courts are full of top players, a grounds pass can offer a remarkable amount of tennis. The exact access that each type of ticket gives, including which stadium seating it covers, varies from year to year, and the tournament publishes the details.
The first week or the second
The choice of when to go shapes what a visitor sees. The first week is the busiest on the grounds: with 96 players in each singles draw plus doubles, the outer courts run match after match from late morning, and almost every top player is still in the event and practicing in public. A spectator who wants volume, close views and the chance to wander between courts is best served early.
The second week thins the field and concentrates it. By the quarterfinals, almost all the singles tennis is in Stadium 1, the grounds are quieter and the matches are the ones people have heard of. A visitor who wants the biggest matches and is happy to spend a session in a single seat will prefer the later days. Many regulars split the trip and see a little of both.
For more on the rest of the American tennis calendar, and on the American players who have won the biggest titles, see our guide to American Grand Slam champions and our tennis section.