If you are running a tennis tournament, you'll want to make the draw, or order in which players play each other, fair. Various governing bodies have standards for creating tournament draws that ensure fair play. The rules for making a draw offer tournament directors some leeway in creating the draw, including the placement of players to ensure a more interesting and competitive event by keeping certain players from meeting in the early rounds.
The Draw
Tennis draws contain an even number of slots, with two opposite slots signifying one match. To create a tennis draw, you'll first need to know how many players you have. Once you have that number, you will know the size of your draw and how many slots you will need to fill. For example, if you have seven players, you will have eight slots in your draw--seven to be filled with players and one filled with a bye. A bye is an empty draw slot that gives the player opposite that slot a pass into the next round of the tournament. If you have 13 players, you will have 16 slots to fill--13 with players and three byes. The draw consists of the tournament director pulling the names of the players out of a hat, jar or using some other method of picking names and placing them in the draw in order of their pick. Tournament draws are often done in public to ensure fairness.
Seeds
If a tournament has seeded players, that means certain players will be ranked in order of their skill level or expected tournament performance, and placed into slots before the draw is made. They are placed in slots starting with the first slot, then the last, then the two middle slots and so on in order to keep the top players from meeting in the first or early rounds. For example, the top player is placed at one end of the draw, and the second-best player is placed at the opposite end. If they are truly the two best two players in the tournament, they will meet in the final. Seeds are awarded based on current league or tour rankings, previous performance in the tournament, or by a committee that evaluates several factors, such as current ranking, recent performances and success on the surface on which the tournament is being played.
Byes
Byes are empty slots in a tournament created when not enough players are available to fill a draw. In our example above, an eight-round tournament with 16 slots and 13 players will have three byes. The byes are placed in the draw opposite the seeded players, in order of their seed. In this instance, the No. 1 seed, No. 2 seed and No. 3 seed would all receive first-round byes and would not have to play a match in the first round.
Wild Cards
In professional tournaments, the tournament director can offer wild cards, or entry into the tournament of players who are not ranked as high as other players who have applied for the tournament.
Avoidance
In order to prevent two players who train together from meeting in the first round, resulting in one of them being eliminated, players can request an avoidance. This means if the tournament director picks their names one after the other so that they are scheduled to play each other in the first round, he can put one of the players back in the hat and select another player. Tournaments award an avoidance to players from the same country, school, academy or city.
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