The players on the eight teams at this week’s Billie Jean King Cup Finals in Shenzhen are playing for a trophy, and they are also banking something that matters two years from now. Under the eligibility rules for tennis at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, nobody can play the Olympic event without having been part of a nominated Davis Cup or Billie Jean King Cup team at least twice during the Olympic cycle, and at least once in 2027 or 2028. The same applies to the men who will contest the Davis Cup Final 8 in Bologna.

The rules are set out in the ITF document Eligibility for the Olympic Tennis Event – LA28, in the version dated July 2026. The document now uses the governing body’s World Tennis name and refers to the World Tennis Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup Regulations. It sits alongside, and is separate from, the qualification system that decides who gets the places in each draw, which we cover in Olympic Tennis Explained.

The five conditions

To be nominated for and take part in the LA28 tennis event, a player must meet all five of the following, unless the rules provide otherwise:

• The Olympic Charter. The player must comply with it, including Rule 41 on the nationality of competitors.
• Good standing. The player must be in good standing with their national association and the governing body under the Davis Cup or Billie Jean King Cup Regulations in force at the time of the Games.
• Eligibility to represent the nation. The player must satisfy the “Eligibility to Represent a Nation” rule in those same regulations for the country whose national association and national Olympic committee nominate them.
• Age. Men must be 14 and women 15 by the opening day of the Olympic tennis event, checked against the passport used for accreditation.
• Team participation. The player must meet the minimum participation requirement in the Davis Cup or Billie Jean King Cup.

What counts as an appearance

The participation requirement is specific. A player must be part of the final nominated Davis Cup or Billie Jean King Cup team, and be present at the tie or event, on at least two occasions during the Olympic cycle. One of those two occasions must fall in 2027 or 2028. The cycle runs from Monday 5 August 2024 to Monday 12 June 2028, a closing date the ITF still marks as to be confirmed.

Two details decide most cases. First, being named is not enough: the player has to be on the final nominated team and physically present. Second, a nomination for a Davis Cup Finals, a Billie Jean King Cup Finals or any Regional Group event counts as a single occasion, however many ties the player takes part in that week. A player who travels to Shenzhen this week and plays three ties has one occasion, not three.

The timing rule means that appearances in 2025 and 2026 cannot complete the requirement on their own. A player with two nominations already in the bank still needs one more in 2027 or the first half of 2028 unless the exceptions below apply.

When the rule bends

A player who meets every other condition but not the participation requirement can still be declared eligible. The decision belongs to a panel named in the regulations for the Olympic tennis event, which may use its discretion when there are special circumstances. The document lists four, while making clear the list is not closed:

• Injury or illness, supported by medical records that clearly identify the period of absence from all competitive tennis.
• Newcomers, meaning players who only reached a ranking good enough for national team selection late in the cycle.
• Strength of nation, where a country has so many highly ranked players that the competition for places limits a player’s chances to be selected.
• Commitment and achievement, meaning a player’s past participation or results at the Olympics, the Davis Cup or the Billie Jean King Cup.

The injury ground is narrower than it looks. The records must show an absence from all competitive tennis, which on the wording of the rule does not fit a player who was well enough to play tour events but did not turn up for national team duty.

The passport half of the rule

Because Olympic eligibility borrows the team competitions’ nationality test, the 2026 Billie Jean King Cup Regulations show what a woman needs to represent a country. She must be a citizen who holds a valid passport of that nation and has held it for at least two years in the past five.

Where a nation does not issue its own passport, a qualifying passport confirming the player’s birthplace as that nation, held for the same period, can be used instead. A player who has lived in the country for five consecutive years can qualify without a passport if she has a genuine reason she cannot hold one and was born there, has a parent or grandparent born there, or has the right to remain permanently or humanitarian protection.

She must also not have represented another nation in a previous Billie Jean King Cup, other than the junior event, or at the Olympic tennis event. For that purpose, being nominated counts as representing: at the Finals from midday local time on the day before the first match, and at every other tie from the time of the draw.

There are two routes around those limits, and both take time. A national association can apply to the ITF’s Internal Adjudication Panel for a special exemption, but it must show that the player has a sufficient, genuine connection and commitment to life and tennis in the nation, and the complete application must reach the ITF at least three months before the tie.

Where a player may be eligible for more than one nation, the nominating nation must also file three months in advance; the ITF notifies the other nation, which has 15 days to comment. The ITF Executive then decides, with one appeal to the panel within 14 days and no appeal beyond that.

Good standing is more than a clean record

The good-standing test in the Billie Jean King Cup Regulations is broader than avoiding suspensions. Among its criteria, a player must make herself available for selection for the ITF’s official team championships and the Olympic tennis event, must not owe the ITF fines of 500 dollars or more after being given time to pay, and must accept her national association’s jurisdiction while playing ties for it.

Her national association makes the first decision on good standing, and only some parts of that decision can be reviewed by the Internal Adjudication Panel. The Davis Cup has its own set of regulations, which the LA28 document cites in the same way; this piece quotes the women’s text because it is the rulebook in use in Shenzhen this week.

What is still to come

The eligibility rules are not the last word. The ITF says it will publish separate regulations for the Olympic tennis event, covering conditions of entry and how to apply to the panel, and a qualification system setting out how the places are allocated. The eligibility rules themselves can still be supplemented or amended by the International Olympic Committee or the governing body before the tennis event begins. For the timing of the event itself, see our report on the LA 2028 tennis schedule, and for the structure of the women’s team competition, How Billie Jean King Cup Works.

A hard court is not one surface. The International Tennis Federation, which writes the technical standards for the sport, puts every court on a single scale called the Court Pace Rating, and sorts surfaces into five categories from slow to fast according to where they land. The number decides which ball a tournament should use, and in the ITF’s own team competitions it sets a hard limit on how quick or slow a home nation may make its court. With the season now on the hard courts of the Asian swing and heading indoors for Europe, it is the governing body’s measure of what players mean when they call a court quick or slow.

Everything below comes from the ITF’s 2026 technical booklet, ITF Approved Tennis Balls, Classified Surfaces and Recognised Courts, which is effective from 1 January to 31 December 2026, and from the 2026 Billie Jean King Cup Regulations.

What the number measures

Court Pace Rating, or CPR, measures what happens to the ball when it hits the court. Two properties matter. The first is friction: a rougher surface grips the ball harder and takes more speed off it horizontally, so it plays slower. The second is restitution, the energy the surface gives back upwards. A surface that sends the ball up higher is also perceived to play slower, the ITF explains, because the player has more time to reach it.

CPR combines the two in one formula: 100 multiplied by one minus the coefficient of friction, plus 150 multiplied by the difference between 0.81 and the coefficient of restitution. The 0.81 is the ITF’s mean restitution value across all surface types, and the restitution figure is corrected for the temperature of the test balls. A court scores higher, and so counts as faster, when friction goes down, when the bounce goes down, or both.

How the test is done

The ITF test method, coded ITF CS 01/02, uses a compressed-air ball cannon. It fires a ball at the court at 30 metres per second, plus or minus two, at an angle of 16 degrees, with almost no spin: no more than three revolutions per second. Instruments measure the ball’s horizontal and vertical speed before and after the bounce to within 0.05 metres per second, and friction and restitution are calculated from those readings.

Three high-specification test balls are fired three times each, for nine impacts, with the impact point moved every time. On site, the ITF recommends testing in at least four locations covering heavily and lightly used areas of the court, and the result is the mean rating for all impacts excluding the lines. Grass and artificial grass, which have a grain, are tested in the direction of play. Testing should not go ahead if the average temperature of the balls cannot be kept between 10 and 30 degrees Celsius. In the laboratory, samples at least half a metre square are conditioned at 23 degrees for three hours first.

The five categories

• Category 1, slow: a CPR of 29 or lower. Most clay courts and other unbound mineral surfaces fall here.
• Category 2, medium-slow: 30 to 34.
• Category 3, medium: 35 to 39. The ITF says most acrylic-coated surfaces and some carpets fall in categories 2 and 3.
• Category 4, medium-fast: 40 to 44.
• Category 5, fast: 45 or higher. Most natural grass, artificial grass and some carpets fall in categories 4 and 5, according to the ITF.

The categories describe pace only. The ITF is explicit that classification is not an approval or endorsement of a product, and that a product can be refused classification if the ITF considers it unsuitable for tennis.

How precise it is

The rating is not exact, and the ITF says so. Round-robin testing between accredited laboratories puts the uncertainty of the method at plus or minus two points. When a surface’s mean rating is within two points of the next category, the manufacturer is allowed to choose which of the two categories it is listed in.

Installation adds more variation. For a new court built by experienced contractors with quality materials, the ITF’s guide tolerance is five points either side of the product’s quoted rating, and the difference between test locations on the same court should not exceed ten points. The layers underneath the playing surface can change the reading too. ITF classification of a surface product lasts three years, after which it must be retested to stay on the list.

Which ball goes with which court

The reason the ITF classifies courts at all is to match them to balls. The Rules of Tennis approve three standard ball types. Type 1, the fast ball, is intended for slow courts. Type 2, the medium ball, is intended for medium-slow, medium and medium-fast courts. Type 3, the slow ball, is intended for fast courts; it is physically larger, between 7.00 and 7.30 centimetres across against 6.54 to 6.86 for the other two, and the ITF also recommends it for play at altitudes above 1,219 metres on any surface. The ball, not only the court, therefore shapes how quickly a match plays. For more on the balls the majors use, see our guide to tennis balls at the major tournaments.

Where the rating becomes a rule

For most tournaments the ITF’s test methods are recommendations, not requirements; the booklet says so in capital letters. The ITF’s team competitions are different. Under the 2026 Billie Jean King Cup Regulations, any court other than grass or clay used in the competition must have a measured Court Pace Rating between 24 and 50 inclusive, tested with the ball chosen for the tie. Hard courts at the Finals, the Qualifiers and the Play-offs must be ITF-classified surface products.

That matters because the home nation in a Qualifier or Play-off tie chooses the surface and the ball, and a very fast or very slow court is an obvious way to tilt a tie. If on-site testing shows the match court is outside the permitted range, the ITF’s Internal Adjudication Panel can dock Nations Ranking points, impose a fine, withhold payments, strip the nation of its future choice of ground, relegate it, disqualify it or order it to compensate the visitors. We explain the competition’s structure in How Billie Jean King Cup Works and its men’s counterpart in How Davis Cup Works.

What the number does not tell you

A Court Pace Rating describes one court on one day. The ITF notes that a surface’s properties change with the weather, with use and with maintenance, and its court recognition scheme states that test results are valid only for the day they were taken. An acrylic court needs about a week to settle after it is laid before it is tested, and clay or artificial grass can take months.

The rating also measures only the ball and the surface. It says nothing about air density, altitude or humidity, and the ITF’s own tolerances allow two new courts laid with the same product to test several points apart. That wider picture is covered in our explainers on why hard courts do not all play the same and why court surfaces matter.

Tennis at the 20th Asian Games starts in Nagoya on Sunday September 27 and runs to October 3rd. It matters more than a multi-sport event on the edge of the tour calendar usually does: the men’s and women’s singles champions take the first places decided anywhere for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic tennis event, and one of the region’s biggest names has given up a WTA 1000 to be there.

The venue. Matches are played at the Nagoya City Higashiyama Park Tennis Center. It opened in 1993 and was renovated for the Games, according to the organising committee, and it also stages the soft tennis and wheelchair tennis events. The Games as a whole run from 19 September to 4 October across Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya.

The events. Five titles are on offer: men’s singles, women’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles.

What is at stake for LA 2028. The ITF sets aside six ITF Places in each of the men’s and women’s Olympic singles draws, and four of them go to regional champions. The Asian, Pan-American, African and, for the first time, Pacific Games singles winners qualify for Los Angeles as long as they are ranked inside the top 500 and their nation’s quota of four has not already been filled by direct acceptance. The top-500 threshold is new; at the last Olympics it was top 400.

Nagoya is where the first of those places are decided, with the other continental places settled in 2027. Direct acceptance itself is based on the ATP and WTA singles rankings of 12 June 2028. Our Olympic tennis explainer covers the rest of the qualification system, and our LA 2028 schedule piece covers the calendar.

The last champions. The 2023 singles titles in Hangzhou went to China’s Zheng Qinwen and Zhang Zhizhen, according to the ITF. Zheng went on to win Olympic gold in Paris a year later. The ITF notes that both would have qualified on ranking anyway; the route matters most to players who would not, and it points to Brazil’s Laura Pigossi, who reached Paris 2024 solely by winning the Pan-American Games singles title.

The Beijing clash. The tennis event overlaps the China Open, whose WTA 1000 main draw begins on 30 September. The China Open is a mandatory event for eligible players, and skipping a mandatory WTA 1000 without an exemption brings a ranking penalty and may bring fines, Reuters reported. The Philippine Tennis Association has formally requested an exemption from the WTA so that Alexandra Eala can represent the Philippines, Reuters reported on 16 September.

“We have formally requested an exemption and we respect the WTA’s process,” PHILTA secretary general John Rey Tiangco said. “At the same time, Alex has made her decision to represent the Philippines at the Asian Games, and we fully support her.” The WTA’s own China Open preview lists Eala among the players not competing in Beijing, citing a schedule change. How the zero-point rule works for mandatory events is set out in our WTA 1000 guide.

Alexandra Eala. Ranked 18th, Eala is the highest-ranked player in the Asian Games women’s singles draw, according to Reuters. She arrives after the best season of her career, including her first WTA title at the DC Open in August, and she won two bronze medals at the 2023 Games. The women’s singles is scheduled to open on the first day, with the first and second rounds and the first round of the mixed doubles on 27 September from 10:00 local time.

Entries and draws. The full entry lists and draws are published on the Games’ official results site, results.asiangames2026.org. This guide does not list seeds or entrants because we could not confirm them against an official source before publication.

How to watch. The host broadcaster is CMG-IMP, and national rights holders carry the Games in each territory. In the Philippines, coverage is on ONE Sports and Cignal TV. Local time in Nagoya is Japan Standard Time, GMT+9.

The same week on tour. While Nagoya plays, the ATP moves to Tokyo and Beijing and the WTA begins its two-week China Open. Our China Open guide and The Asian Swing Explained cover the tour side of the calendar.

Mirra Andreeva‘s first match at the Singapore Tennis Open this week was a second-round match. The No. 1 seed beat Aliaksandra Sasnovich 6-2, 6-2 without having played a first-round match at all. Maja Chwalinska, the No. 5 seed, had to start in the first round. The difference between them is a bye.

What a bye is

A knockout bracket only works cleanly with a power of two: 32, 64 or 128 players. Many tour events use draws that fall between those numbers, such as 28, 48, 56 or 96 players. The empty lines in the bracket are byes. A player drawn next to one goes into the second round without playing and waits there for the winner of a first-round match.

The ATP rulebook builds the draw that way. For a field of 48 or 56, it specifies a draw sheet with 64 places: the seeds and byes are placed first, and the remaining players, qualifiers included, are drawn into the spaces left over.

How many byes each draw size creates

• 28-player draw: four byes, on a 32-line bracket. Singapore, Ningbo and Tokyo all use 28-player singles draws on this year’s WTA Asian swing.
• 32-player draw: no byes. Seoul, Osaka and Guangzhou use 32.
• 48-player draw: 16 byes, on a 64-line bracket.
• 56-player draw: eight byes, on a 64-line bracket. The Wuhan Open uses 56.
• 96-player draw: 32 byes, on a 128-line bracket. The women’s event at the China Open in Beijing uses 96.
• 128-player draw: no byes. The four Grand Slams use 128.

Draw sizes for each tournament category are covered in the guides to ATP 250, ATP 500, ATP Masters 1000, WTA 500 and WTA 1000 events.

Who gets them

Byes go to the top seeds, in order. In Singapore’s 28-player draw the four byes went to the top four seeds, which is why Andreeva, as No. 1, started in the second round and Chwalinska, at No. 5, did not. In a 96-player draw there are 32 byes to hand out, so a much deeper group of seeded players skips the first round.

Seeds come from the rankings, so a bye is usually earned over months rather than in the week itself. How rankings translate into seedings is explained in How Grand Slam Seedings Are Determined by Rankings.

The WTA has also used byes to protect players coming off a deep run the week before. In 2019 the Wuhan semifinals and final were played on the Friday and Saturday, with the Beijing main draw starting on the Saturday, and the WTA gave the Wuhan semifinalists what it called performance byes into the second round in Beijing. Whether an event uses them depends on the tour’s rules for that season.

What a bye is worth in ranking points

A bye is not a win. The ATP’s 2026 rulebook states that a player who reaches the second round by drawing a bye and then loses is treated as having lost in the first round and receives first-round loser’s points.

That matters because of how the ATP points table is built. At ATP 500 and ATP 250 events, a first-round loss earns no points, so a seed who receives a bye at one of those events and loses the opening match leaves with nothing. At a 96-player ATP Masters 1000, a first-round loss is worth 10 points, so a seed who loses straight after a bye leaves with 10. From the second match on, the table applies as normal: a seed who wins after a bye and then loses in the third round of a 96-player Masters takes the round-of-32 figure, 50 points.

The WTA publishes its own points table for each event. On the current Asian swing, a first-round loss is worth 1 point in Singapore’s 28-player WTA 500 and 10 points in Beijing’s 96-player WTA 1000. For the wider picture, see How Tennis Rankings Work.

Why it matters on court

The arithmetic is simple. In a 28-player draw, a player with a bye needs four wins to take the title and everyone else needs five. In a 96-player draw it is six against seven. On a stretch of the calendar with back-to-back weeks across Asia, one fewer match is a real saving.

The other side of it is that a seed’s first match always comes against a player who has already won a match at the event that week, while the seed has not yet played one there.

More: the Singapore and Seoul draws, the China Open Guide, the Wuhan Open Guide, What Is a Lucky Loser in Tennis and How Tennis Qualifying Works.