Wimbledon 2010: Epic halted at 59-59 in fifth set | Hacker News Reader

Wimbledon 2010: Epic halted at 59-59 in fifth set

news.bbc.co.uk

61 pointsSandB0x18 comments

The guardian live blog is hilarious and well worth a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/jun/23/wimbledon-2010-t...

"7pm: What's going on here? Once, long ago, I think that this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the winner of this match would then go on to face the winner of another match and, if he won that, the winner of another match. And so on until he reached the final and, fingers crossed, he won the title.

That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to be; what it started out as. It's not that anymore and hasn't been for a few hours now. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it is long and it's horrifying and it's very long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.

42 games all."

"6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have now started eating members of the audience. They trudge back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court 18 until every spectator is eaten. Only then, they say, will they consider ending their contest."

We were just talking about the overtime rules of various sports at lunch today. Tennis has (to me) one of the fairest systems. The sport is aided by the fact that every serve onto the court ends in a point being scored. Basketball is also pretty high up there on the fairness scale. NFL football is terrible (we'll have to see how the new rules play out); college football is much better (but not perfect). Soccer and hockey are not good; I don't like the game being decided by a special mechanism (penalty shots/shoot out) fundamentally different from the regulation time play.

There's my unsolicted $0.02.

As my soccer friend explained things to me. After playing regulation time and extra time, your body just can't take it anymore. Adding additional time until somebody scores would be futile in his opinion.

At least the NHL drops shootouts during the playoffs. They are a rare enough occurrence during the regular season that they probably don't have too much of an effect on fairness in terms of their effect on the end-of-season standings.

It’s just that fair is not necessarily the same as good. The nerve wrecking, random and unfair nature of penalty shootouts is very much part of soccer.

This is not to say that every sport should have some sort of very arbitrary and unfair mechanism. I quite like tennis, it’s just to say that not everyone might think that fair is always a synonym for good.

What was also interesting and (probably more relevant to HN) were the scoreboard failures. The on-court scoreboard stopped at 47-47 and had to be shut down. The MatchTracker on the official website reset at 50-50 and at the end displayed 9-9 instead of 59-59. I wonder how many other online scoreboards failed and how many were equal to the task.

Those edge cases that you never expect to occur sometimes do occur. On the online scoreboard, you would think that they should have at least successfully gone to 99-99 (after that, they'd run out of physical space on the flash UI). But I suspect that for whatever reason, somebody set a hard limit at 50. I'd be curious to see if they fix it by tomorrow when play resumes.

The fifth set alone was longer than any other tennis match in history...incredible.

This should be the new Energizer ad.

Definitely. One will be a first round loser, and the eventual winner will likely lose the next match and be paid as a second round loser. The least that can be done is some sponsorship deal for both of them.

After a match this long, I would bet heavily that whoever wins will lose their next match. I wonder how much odds-makers will adjust odds in the next round because of this.

No doubt for more than just fatigue. There's a reason most of the longer matches occur between lower-ranked players; neither opponent has the mental fortitude to change strategy accordingly. Not to be mean, I do concede that Isner and Mahut both have heart to fight for 7 plus hours, but this wouldn't happen between Federer and Nadal because they learn and adapt during a match, not just go tit for tat. Both of these guys serve very well, but return very averagely.

Except Isner is not a low ranked player. He's no 23 in the world. Granted, his biggest weapon is his huge serve and this is his main advantage. I don't think all of the top players are as versatile as you propose. Even "versatile" players fall back to their strengths when they go through these five set marathon matches. Look no further than the 2008 Wimbeldon final where Nadal battled Federer for almost 5 hours and eeked out the fifth set 9-7. At the time, commentators were claiming this to be the greatest tennis match ever.

Is there a service which will take a mobile/print view of an article and put you back at the canonical one, at least for major websites?

And after the long day of tennis, the pair returned to their abutting hotel rooms to hash out the plan for tomorrow.

tl;dr: The match was locked at 59-59 in the final set after 10 hours of play when it was suspended because of bad light.

Resumes for the 3rd day on Thursday. Previous best was 6:35, so this is a lot longer than the previous record.

The result of Professor Carreira (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455037) and colleagues hard work.

This is the kind of story I'd expect to see on the front page of Digg. An unusually protracted game of tennis isn't really hacker news, imo.

Don't forget: when you vote something onto the front page, something else gets pushed off.

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