Men's-Only and Women's-Only Pools: Why We Split Them

When you create a pool on TennisPools, the first real decision isn't the format — it's the draw. Every pool follows exactly one singles draw: men's or women's, chosen by the commissioner at creation. There is no combined mode, and that's deliberate.

Groups occasionally ask why. Here's the reasoning, and how to play both draws if that's what your crew wants (spoiler: it takes two minutes).

They are two different tournaments

The US Open men's singles and women's singles share a venue and a fortnight, and nothing else. Each is its own 128-player draw — its own seeds, its own bracket, its own seven rounds from Round 1 to the final, its own champion. There's no match where the two draws touch.

A pool is a game played on a bracket. Two brackets means two games. Mashing them into one pool wouldn't make a bigger game; it would make two games wearing one leaderboard, where your standing in one draw gets muddied by noise from the other.

The tennis itself is different

The two draws don't just run in parallel — they're played under different match formats, and the differences run straight into how pools score.

Best-of-five versus best-of-three. Men's Grand Slam matches are best of five sets; women's are best of three. That's not a detail. Five sets gives the stronger player more time to recover from a bad patch, which makes big favorites safer picks in the men's draw. Best of three gives an inspired underdog a real window, which makes early rounds in the women's draw slightly more upset-prone. A survivor pick or a bracket flyer means something different in each draw — mixing them in one pool would blur exactly the judgment the game is testing.

Bracket Scores literally has different answers. In our Bracket Scores format you call the exact set score of every match. In a men's pool the possible calls are 3-0, 3-1, or 3-2. In a women's pool they're 2-0 or 2-1. One pool, one set of rules — that only works when one pool means one draw.

Clean games beat big games

Splitting the draws keeps every part of the pool sharp:

• Survivor stays honest. One pick per round, seven rounds, no player used twice — against a single 128-player field. A combined player list would double the safe picks and gut the scarcity that makes survivor tense in week two.
• Brackets stay comparable. Everyone in a Full Draw pool faces the same 127 matches; everyone in a Sweet 16 pool faces the same 15. Leaderboard positions mean exactly one thing.
• Deadlines stay obvious. Your pool's clock runs on its own draw's schedule — picks lock when your draw's matches start. No cross-referencing two schedules to figure out what's still open.

"But my group wants both"

Great — run both. Create two pools: a men's and a women's. Each takes about a minute, your group joins each with its own invite link, and every member can be in as many pools as they like on one free account.

Two pools genuinely beats one combined pool:

• Two chances to win. Your friend who nails the men's draw doesn't automatically own the women's — separate leaderboards, separate bragging rights, twice the sweat.
• Mix the formats. Nothing says the pools must match: plenty of groups run a men's Full Draw for the die-hards and a women's Survivor for everyone (or the reverse). Pick what fits each crew.
• People can opt into one or both. The colleague who only follows the women's tour joins that pool and skips the other. Nobody's forced to guess at a draw they don't watch.

On pricing, nothing sneaky: pools with up to 5 members are free, and bigger pools pay a one-time $2 per member beyond the first 5 — per pool, paid by the commissioner. A five-person crew running both draws pays nothing at all. And the deadlines take care of themselves: each pool emails its own reminders on its own draw's schedule, so members in both pools get nudged for both — nobody has to remember that the men's bracket and the women's bracket lock at different first balls if the schedule shakes out that way.

The commissioner's one job here

Decide before you create: which draw is this pool following? If your group has a clear allegiance, easy. If not, the two-pool play is the answer, not a coin flip — announce both links in the same message and let people sort themselves.

The US Open draws — both of them — land around August 27, and both tournaments start Sunday, August 30 with 128 players each. Two brackets, two champions, two pools' worth of arguments. Start yours — then start the other one.