Survivor · Last one standing
Tennis Survivor Pool — rules and how to run one
A tennis survivor pool is the simplest way to sweat a Grand Slam with friends. Each round of the tournament, every member picks one player who must win their match. A right pick keeps you alive. A wrong pick — or a missed pick — knocks you out. No player can be used twice, so the tournament gets harder exactly as the tennis does. The last member standing wins the pool.
How a survivor pool works
One pick per round
Each round, you pick one player who must win their match. Lock your pick in before the round's first ball.
Seven rounds
A Grand Slam singles draw has seven rounds: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, the Round of 16, the quarterfinals, the semifinals, and the final. Survive all seven and you have made seven straight correct picks.
Wrong pick, you're out
If your player loses — or you forget to pick before the deadline — you're eliminated. There are no second chances and no points to fall back on.
No player twice
Every player can be used only once per tournament. Spend the world number 1 in Round 1 and they're gone for the two weeks that follow.
Retirements and walkovers
Tennis rules apply: whoever advances counts as the winner. If your player's opponent retires mid-match or withdraws before it (a walkover), your pick wins. If your player is the one who withdrew, the pick loses.
Last one standing wins
The pool ends when one member outlasts everyone else. And if every remaining member falls in the same round, nobody is eliminated — they all finish as co-champions and split the pot.
A worked example: spend the star or save them?
The whole game lives inside the no-reuse rule. In Round 1, the world number 1 plays a qualifier and is as close to a sure thing as tennis offers. Pick them and you almost certainly survive the round — but they're now spent for the rest of the tournament.
Maya · burns the stars early
Maya picks the top seed in Round 1, the second seed in Round 2, and two more title favorites in Round 3 and the Round of 16. Easy wins, four rounds survived — but by the quarterfinals every player left in the draw is dangerous, and all of her safe names are used up. She's forced onto a genuine coin-flip match. It lands wrong. Eliminated in the quarterfinals.
Liam · saves them for the crunch
Liam opens with a 12th seed facing a qualifier, then works through solid mid-tier seeds in Rounds 2 and 3 — slightly riskier picks, but still heavy favorites. When the quarterfinals arrive and the matches turn brutal, he still has the world's top two players unused. He rides them through the semifinals and final. Last one standing.
Neither plan is guaranteed — Liam's 12th seed can lose on day one, and sometimes the safe early picks are exactly right. But the field gets tougher every round, so the deeper the tournament goes, the more an elite player still in your pocket is worth.
Survivor strategy tips
Plan all seven rounds, not one
Before Round 1, sketch a candidate pick for every round. You'll immediately see where your safe options run thin — usually the quarterfinals onward — and which stars you need to hold back for those weeks-two rounds.
Spend mid-tier seeds early
In Round 1 and Round 2, seeded players drawn against qualifiers and unseeded opponents win far more often than they lose. A seed ranked somewhere 10 through 30 is usually plenty safe early — you don't need to burn a title favorite yet.
Save the giants for the Round of 16 onward
From the Round of 16, every match is seed against seed and there are no easy picks left. That's when having the top two or three players in the world still unused wins pools.
Best-of-five favors favorites
Men's Grand Slam matches are best of five sets, which gives the stronger player more time to recover from a bad patch — big favorites are even safer there. Women's matches are best of three, so early upsets are slightly more common.
Never miss a deadline
A missed pick eliminates you exactly like a losing one. TennisPools emails a reminder before every round's deadline — but set your own alarm for the rounds you care about.
US Open 2026 · Flushing Meadows
Run one for the US Open 2026
The draw is released around August 27 and the first ball is Sunday, August 30 — men's and women's singles, 128 players each. Set your pool up now, share one invite link, and picks open the moment the draw drops. Free for pools of up to 5 members; bigger pools pay a one-time $2 per extra member, and members never pay TennisPools anything.
Prefer predicting the whole draw instead? See the Bracket challenge.