A match on the ATP tour and a match on the ITF women’s circuit look like different sports. One fills an arena. The other is played on a side court in front of twenty people.

Measure them, though, and most of what you expect to differ does not.

Losing the First Set Costs About the Same Everywhere

Across 116,382 completed professional singles matches, the player who loses the opening set wins 16. 52% of the time. Split by circuit:

• ATP: 18.21%, from 10,945 matches
• Challenger men: 17.32%, from 30,406 matches
• Challenger women: 17.25%, from 4,731 matches
• WTA: 17.04%, from 13,543 matches
• ITF women: 15.97%, from 29,331 matches
• ITF men: 15.18%, from 27,415 matches

Three percentage points separate the top of that list from the bottom. Six circuits, six standards of play, and the shape of a match barely moves.

The Serve Is Where They Come Apart

Now count service games instead of matches. How often the server wins the game, over 2,294,737 of them:

• ATP: 78.62%, from 230,715 games
• Challenger men: 74.10%
• ITF men: 70.26%
• WTA: 64.36%
• Challenger women: 60.40%
• ITF women: 58.93%, from 553,157 games

A spread of 19.69 percentage points, more than six times the gap in comeback rates. An ATP server loses one game in five. An ITF woman loses two in five.

The difference between the top and the bottom of professional tennis is almost all about whether serve gets held. What follows a lost set barely moves.

The Court Does the Same Thing

Hold rates by surface, over the 2,239,440 games whose surface the feed stated:

• Grass: 74.43%
  
• Hard: 69.95%
• Clay: 65.98%

Eight and a half points between grass and clay. Tiebreaks follow it exactly, turning up in 31.73% of grass matches against 22.52% on clay.

Comeback rates by surface do not follow at all. Grass gives 17.20%, clay 16.79% and hard courts 16.47%, which is three quarters of one point across all three.

What Does Predict the Result

One thing moves the number a long way, and it is the scoreline of the set already lost:

• Lost the first set 7-6: wins 21.92% of the time, from 14,265 matches
• Lost it 6-4: 19.41%
• Lost it 6-3: 17.39%
• Lost it 6-1: 11.06%, from 14,269 matches
• Lost it 6-0: 7.18%

Three times apart, and two of those groups are almost the same size, 14,265 and 14,269. How badly the set was lost tells you more than the tour, the surface or the serve.

Where the Figures Come From

Completed best-of-three singles on the ATP, WTA, Challenger and ITF circuits, 1 January 2023 to 14 September 2026. Retirements and walkovers are excluded, and every figure is counted from the point-by-point record of each match.

Best of five behaves differently. On the ATP the comeback rate rises to 23.98% over 1,597 matches, against 18.21% over three sets.

The tables are at “blog.livetennisapi.com/studies.json” (https://blog.livetennisapi.com/studies.json) under CC BY 4.0, free to reuse with attribution. They come from the Live Tennis API which serves live scores, fixtures and match events over JSON. The free tier does not ask for a card.

Figures as of 14 September 2026. Attribution: Live Tennis API.