It’s hardly unprecedented. On the ATP Tour, since 2006, whenever a men’s doubles match splits the first two sets, no third set gets played at all. The deciding set disappears, replaced by a first-to-10 breaker, and everyone moves on with their day. It was brought in mostly to make broadcasters’ scheduling easier and to tempt more singles players onto doubles courts. Now, twenty years later, with a spark from one marquee event, the mechanism has triggered a pretty public argument about whether it belongs anywhere near ATP singles.

It happened on day two of the ninth Laver Cup, currently underway at London’s O2 Arena, where any match tied at one set apiece skips a third set entirely and goes straight to a ten-point match tiebreak. The format has been part of the Laver Cup since its 2017 debut, when the event was launched by Roger Federer, Tony Godsick and TEAM8 with its founding partners, designed specifically to keep matches inside a tidy window. Watching it do its job yet again, longtime Sports Illustrated writer and Tennis Channel analyst Jon Wertheim posted on X:

“Heresy time: Laver Cup playing a first-to-ten tiebreak in lieu of a decisive set is something tennis ought to consider broadly. Said no fan today: ‘You know, I wish they would have played that out.’ Plenty of entertainment. Plenty of tennis. And matches stayed in the 2:00 range.”

Tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg, who writes the Bounces newsletter, pushed it further. “Would be such an easy and smart thing to trial at the 250 level,” he wrote on X, pointing to the tour’s lower-tier tournaments as the obvious place to experiment.

As it turns out, the sport has been inching toward this idea for years, just never all at once. The 2006 doubles change is the closest cousin. Years later, then-ATP executive chairman Chris Kermode called doubles an integral part of the tour’s success. Not everyone bought it, though.

British doubles No. 1 Jamie Murray called the system “nonsense” in 2017, arguing that Grand Slam doubles still uses traditional scoring and that “the best team wins.” Other players, including Raven Klaasen, criticized the Match Tie-break because a match could be decided by a brief burst of play.

Well, then there’s the Masters 1000 level. Masters 1000 finals were mostly best-of-five until 2007, when the ATP began phasing in best-of-three finals; from 2008 onward, all Masters finals were best-of-three, in part because of concerns over the physical demands of five-set finals in a crowded calendar. But debate surrounds it still.

Current ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi shared in late 2024 that he and Federer had discussed, at Laver Cup itself, whether Masters finals should actually go back to five sets, on the logic that the sport’s most memorable matches have tended to be its longest ones.

That said, the ATP’s actual testing ground for radical formats, the Next Gen ATP Finals, has been running since 2017 with short sets to four games, no-ad scoring, no lets and a shot clock, built to court new and younger fans while retaining the sport’s traditional audience. Its debut edition produced matches averaging one hour and 36 minutes, only three minutes shorter than the regular 2017 ATP Tour average of 1:39. So, changing the scoring format does not necessarily produce a dramatic reduction in total match time.

More relevant to Rothenberg’s popularity argument is what the US Open did with mixed doubles last year. A standalone two-day event during Fan Week, with again, four-game sets, no-ad scoring, and a ten-point tiebreak in place of a third set. The 2025 US Open drew 1,144,562 fans across its full three-week run, a nine percent increase over 2024. Arthur Ashe Stadium sold out for both days of the mixed doubles event, while its ESPN/ESPN2 coverage averaged 343,000 viewers.

Even at the Grand Slams, tennis has increasingly trusted the 10-point breaker to end deciding sets. Though, in singles, it has remained a tiebreak within the final set rather than a replacement for the entire set. John Isner and Nicolas Mahut’s 70-68 final set at 2010 Wimbledon, spread over eleven hours and three days, is the match that started that conversation. Wimbledon introduced the final-set tiebreak in 2019, and by 2022 the Grand Slam Board unified all four majors around one rule: a ten-point breaker at six games all in the decider, adopted across every major from that year on.

For now, neither the ATP nor any tournament director has said anything publicly about actually testing it.