Four hours or an hour and a half? The length of a tennis game is very misleading

“What a great game: almost 4 hours of high level tennis!” – it will be? Or, in fact, did the game last less than half that official time? Let’s do the math.

It was the most anticipated game so far in the Australian Open and, probably, the entire tournament: Novak Djokovic beat Carlos Alcaraz.

The Serbian tennis player, at 37 years old, becomes the first Open Era tennis player to reach 50 Grand Slam semifinals. To get there, he defeated Alcaraz in the quarterfinals (or early final) in four stages: 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 e 6-4in 3h37m.

A Official duration of the game was this: 3h37m. Allegedly the two tennis players played for almost 4 hours. But is it really so? No. It never is.

It is almost always said that “player A defeated player B after more than 3 hours of play”… Not true.

In this Tuesday’s big duel, for example: Djokovic received medical assistance during the first set. A pause that lasted a few minutes – but time continued to tick on the official clock.

And then there are many variations: the time each serve takes, the stopping time between each set, even between each game…

The portal has several interesting numbers. On average, they pass 25 or even 30 seconds between each point; a player takes time 15 seconds to serve – if they were all like Rafael Nadal, it would be more than double.

Between every game pause is greater, being on average 90 secondsthat is, a minute and a half between each game.

So, let’s get to the math.

Let’s imagine a duel between Djokovic and Alcaraz that had four ends, which officially lasted 4 hours. On average there were 10 games each set and each game averaged 6 points. It’s a perfectly realistic scenario.

There are 240 points played, but only 200 counts for breaks because of the stops between games. With a 25 second pause between each point, there are 5,000 seconds of stopping; translating, 83 minutes; translating, 1h23m stopped between points.

Now, the breaks between games. As there were 40 (10 in each part), and as on average you stop for 90 seconds, there are 3,600 seconds, or 60 minutes. 1 hour downtime between games.

In short: 2h23m stopped in a total of 4h.

I.e, the game itself didn’t last 4h, but 1h37m. It is less than half of what was advertised.

But even so, this real duration is already remarkable because, let’s see, it’s the duration of a football game but there are only two people on the field, who ran and tried much harder; with stops between points, of course.

The right sentence would even be: “Djokovic defeated Alcaraz in four partials, in a game that ended 4 hours after it started“.

And there are tournaments (like the Australian Open, precisely) in which these numbers would justify even a new detailed analysis, because of the public. Shouting, encouragement, heckling, asides. Constant interruptions that prolong downtime.

Details.