Laver Cup fever is in the air, and that has stirred up a very real debate on whether tennis in general should adapt to the Laver Cup format. And rallying from the front is tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg, who was among those making the case for the sport to test the format more broadly.
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The format itself is simple enough: rather than a traditional best-of-three-sets match, players contest two full sets as normal, but if the score is level at one set apiece, there is no third set played out at all. Instead, the match is decided by a ten-point tie-break, scoring that keeps the matches short and maintains the competitiveness as well.
“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 given how little institutional resistance a change there would likely face compared to Masters events or majors.
Rothenberg’s response came on veteran journalist Jon Wertheim’s argument, framing the case in terms of what fans actually respond to rather than tradition for its own sake.
“Heresy time,” he wrote. “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.”
There have been precedents in the sport which back the argument. ATP Masters 1000 finals were played as best-of-five sets all the way up until 2007, before the tour shifted every Masters final to best-of-three starting in 2008. Instead of taking the edge off of the events, the smaller format has coexisted with the Masters series and only strengthened it since, embedding the larger concept that a shorter format doesn’t necessarily attract less prestige or drama as long as the tennis remains good.
Tennis has already embraced shorter formats
The US Open’s own experiment with a new mixed doubles format is even more recent. Since 2025, the tournament has scaled back mixed doubles to a standalone two-day tournament during Fan Week, making sets of four games with no-ad scoring and replacing a deciding third game with a 10-point match tie-break, the same format that Wertheim is now highlighting.
The results have been hard to argue with commercially. The debut 2025 edition helped the US Open to register a record 1.14 million fans across the tournament, a nine percent jump from the previous year. Arthur Ashe was sold out on both days of the mixed doubles, and ESPN had an average of 343,000 viewers on its broadcast.
Relying on this evidence, both writers are suggesting that shorter formats have consistently proven to be more engaging for casual audiences without sacrificing the competitive integrity the core fans actually care about.