Round Robin Re-Routed
After much public and private debate, the ATP Tour’s Round Robin experiment is no more… players didn’t seem to like it, media coverage of the results was hard to follow at times, tournament directors and fans didn’t seem as excited about it as expected, etc. So was the problem with the format itself, i.e. are round robins in general a bad idea? Or did the implementation cause the confusion, e.g. are 4 player groups better than 3 player groups? Or was the new round robin experiment just
not explained clearly enough and marketed well to players, fans and the media? The answer is likely a bit of a combination of all three… There seems to be an inherent feeling that with round robins “not all matches count.” The math to predict the winners is not always clear to players and fans alike and may sometimes work better with 4 player groups as opposed to 3 player groups. In the end, the results and importance of the actual round robin matches need to be easily explained to players and fans. This is where it seems a lot of the confusion arose. Fans didn’t readily know who was going to advance into the regular draw and everyone likes to think they can predict the future… right?!
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