Introducing Tennis Scorigami

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with extra humor and opinion. Today we’re veering towards numerology.

If you’re a big NFL fan, then you’re probably familiar with the term scorigami, meaning a final score that has never happened before. Jon Bois of Secret Base invented the concept back in 2016 with a YouTube video, and fans quickly became fascinated with tracking in real time whether games with odd-looking scores were likely to become scorigami. The NFL Scorigami Twitter bot has 495K followers! Announcers have even started to mention it on broadcasts. Bois expanded on the history of scorigami in a fantastic YouTube series that earns every second of its 4 hour runtime.

Folks on the internet have tried applying the concept to other sports, but it often doesn’t work quite as well. Baseball doesn’t have enough possibilities. Specific basketball scores lack meaning—115 points isn’t really different from 116. Football is one of the few sports where scoring can only happen in certain intervals (usually 3 and 7), so trying to build a new final score is like trying to put jigsaw puzzle pieces together that might not fit.

Tennis, however, has strong potential. Unlike many other sports, in which the final score is simply a summation of the match and doesn’t tell you anything about how the story progressed, a tennis scoreline tells a narrative.

As far as I’m aware, no bot exists to tell fans in real time whether or not a tennis match scoreline has happened before. So we created one.

@tenniscorigami1 will report the final score of each U.S. Open singles match, and whether we’ve seen that scoreline before in the roughly 50,000 Grand Slam matches since the start of the Open Era in 1968.

Here it is. Give it a follow on X now so you don’t forget before we get into all the nerdy minutiae about tennis scorigami.

Tennis Scorigami@tenniscorigami

Test tweet from the Tennis Scorigami bot.

5:24 AM · Aug 26, 2026 · 21 Views

First, let’s start by seeing how good your math intuition is. What percent of possible men’s tennis best-of-five scorelines do you think have occurred so far in the Open Era? To clarify the rules, we do care about whether the match’s winning or losing player won each set (i.e. 6-4, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 is different from 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4). We will, however, consider all 7-6 sets to be the same regardless of the tiebreaker score.

Take a guess before you keep scrolling.

…

…

…

…

The answer is only 7%!

Tennis scorelines are a great window into how quickly numbers can get big when dealing with exponential functions. There are just 343 possible ways someone can win a best-of-five match in three sets (all of which but one have happened—we’ll get to the holdout shortly). There are 7,203 possible scores for a match that ends in four sets (45% of which have happened). And then, drumroll please… there are 100,842 possible scores for a match that lasts five sets, only 4% of which have happened!

That’s just a ridiculous number of possible scores. With four Grand Slams a year, 127 matches per men’s draw, and less than 20% of matches going the full five sets, there are roughly 100 five-setters every calendar year. If we assume each possible scoreline has an equal chance of happening in any given match, probability says we would expect it to be roughly 1.22 million years before there are no more scorigami left (for context, this is what humans looked like a million years ago).

And that’s if we got lucky. More realistically, some scorelines are extremely unlikely to hit, such as 6-0, 0-6, 6-0, 0-6, 6-0. If we account for the thousands of highly improbable examples like that, we’re probably looking at hundreds of millions of years. Something tells me the U.S. Open won’t still be a 128-player bracket of best-of-five-sets matches 100 million years from now (although Wimbledon might still be).

Despite the vast possibilities of match scorelines, that doesn’t mean any new five-set match is automatically a scorigami. For example, Carlos Alcaraz’s first Wimbledon title over Novak Djokovic in 2023 was by the score of 1-6, 7-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-4. That seems like an unlikely, random combination of numbers, but it happened in a 1996 U.S. Open first round match between Mikael Tillström and Tamer El-Sawy.

If we assume each possible scoreline has an equal chance of happening in any given match, probability says we would expect it to be roughly 1.22 million years before there are no more scorigami left.

Many recent five-set epic Grand Slam finals, however, were scorigami, including:

• 2025 French Open final: Alcaraz d. Sinner 4-6, 6-7, 6-4, 7-6, 7-6

• 2022 Australian Open final: Nadal d. Medvedev 2-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-4, 7-5

• 2014 Wimbledon final: Djokovic d. Federer 6-7, 6-4, 7-6, 5-7, 6-4

• 2012 Australian Open final: Djokovic d. Nadal 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5

You’re probably wondering about that one straight-sets result that has never happened. It’s 6-0, 6-0, 7-5. Interestingly, 6-0, 6-0, 7-6 did happen twice—Khachanov d. Nishioka at the 2023 Australian Open and Cilic d. Altmaier at the 2026 Australian Open—and I specifically remember watching the former instance and being inspired to do this project without even knowing that I was witnessing history.

Leave a comment

Women’s tennis scorigami is arguably more compelling, though, since it closely resembles the aspects of NFL scorigami that we all love. There are a limited number of possible outcomes (735 to be exact) and most have happened, but there are still some weird itches that the sport simply refuses to scratch (I’m shocked anytime I see that 14-8 has never happened in the NFL). For instance, it’s unsurprising that a 6-0, 0-6, 6-0 match has never happened, but 1-6, 6-3, 7-6 looks like a pretty normal score, and yet that has also never happened!

One factor to consider with tennis scorigami is rule changes. Most importantly, tiebreaker rules have undergone a long and winding journey during the Open Era. Prior to 1970, all sets were win-by-two at the majors, so you’d end up with a scoreline like 4-6, 8-6, 13-11, 6-4 in the 1969 U.S. Open quarterfinals. In 1970, the U.S. Open added a five-point tiebreaker at 6-6 for all sets (switched to a seven-point tiebreaker in 1975). Over the next decade, the other three majors added a tiebreaker at 6-6 for all sets except the final set (although Wimbledon briefly did tiebreakers at 8-8 for a few years… who knew!?).

That exception led to some crazy fifth sets, most famously when John Isner and Nicolas Mahut went to 70-68 at Wimbledon in 2010. Safe to say that match was, and always will be, a scorigami. Recently, all the slams switched to 10-point tiebreakers at 6-6 for the final set, in response to criticism after two lengthy men’s semifinals at 2018 Wimbledon.

The lack of a final set tiebreaker for many decades, though, means that scores ending with 7-6 in the final set are now much more likely to be scorigami.

Some other oddities in the data worth noting:

• The only new women’s scorigami unlocked in 2026 so far was Jasmine Paolini’s 0-6, 6-4, 7-5 first round win over Robin Montgomery at Wimbledon.

• Only one men’s match has ever reached at least 6-6 in every single set. Aljaz Bedene beat Ivo Karlovic in the first round of 2017 Wimbledon 6-7, 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 8-6 in what was likely a snoozefest for fans of long rallies. The players each held serve for their first 24 service games before Bedene finally broke to win the match.

• A triple-bagel (6-0, 6-0, 6-0) has happened six times. The most recent victim, ironically, has the last name Champion. You can’t make this stuff up.

• Thrice a man has been bageled in back-to-back sets and still won the match. Amazingly, two of those times were during consecutive rounds of the 1969 French Open when Stanley Matthews won a match 6-3, 0-6, 0-6, 6-4, 8-6 and then Patricio Rodriguez won one 6-2, 6-4, 0-6, 0-6, 6-4 just a day or two later.

• We all felt bad for Amanda Anisimova when she got double bageled by Iga Swiatek in the 2025 Wimbledon final, but the women’s double bagel has actually happened 196 times! Weirdly, though, only 22 times has a man been double-bageled in the first two sets of a match—likely due to men holding serve more frequently than women on average.

Wimbledon eventually got in line with the other slams in regards to playing a10-point final set tiebreaker at 6-6, but it first instituted a seven-point tiebreaker at 12-12 in the fifth set for just two tournaments—in 2019 and 2021. The first time that came into play was the now-famous 2019 final when Djokovic saved two match points and spoiled what would have been an unlikely ride-off-into-the-sunset major at age 37 for Federer, who outplayed Djokovic for the majority of the match. The final ended with a scoreline that now looks like a typo: 7-6, 1-6, 7-6, 4-6, 13-12 (Roger fans wish it was a typo). Therefore, Djokovic’s post-match celebration is the profile picture for our bot’s X account.

We’ll have more U.S. Open scorigami updates (plus related data viz) in Club Sportico next week once the tournament gets going, but for now, follow along on X! The bot is currently in beta mode, but we should have it ready by Sunday for the opening round.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.