Well, the first thing to remember is that tennis has a slightly unusual points system.
The tennis points system
When one player scores, they don't get just 1 point. To complicate things further, every time a player scores, their points go up by different amounts:
First off, if you have 0 points - it's called 'love".
Then the first 'point' scored by a player in a game is 15, the second is 30. However the third point isn't 45 like the pattern would suggest, it's only 40.
Once a player reaches 40, they just need to score once more to win the 'game' point. The only time where this wouldn't happen is if the two players were tied at 40-40 (this is called deuce).
If this happens, the first player who scores two points in a row wins.
Game, set, match!
You may have heard this expression before - it's basically the structure of a tennis match.
I've described what a player must do to win a 'game' of tennis, but to win the entire match, a player needs to win the most sets.
In a men's game, the number of sets is limited at 5. For women, it's 3.
To win a set, a player simply needs to win 6 games. But just like the winner of a game needs to have at least a 2 point lead, the same applies to sets. If the number of games won by two players stands at 5-5, then a player would need to play until 7-5 to take the set (or 8-6, 9-7, etc...).
There's a limit to how many games can be played in a set, and this is dealt with by the 'tie break rule' which you can read about here.
The future of tennis?
I'd love for tennis scoring to be simplified. I think it's kind of confusing to me too, but tennis is a sport steeped in tradition and history, and changes aren't adopted all that easily. Having said that, tennis was using 'hawk-eye' technology to track where the ball lands way before other sporting bodies were convinced about it - so maybe tennis is a progressive sport after all!
When I think of tennis and technology merging in the future, I'd like to think it would like a little bit like this Lacoste Ad:
