The United States Open Tennis Championships is a tennis tournament held on hard courts. The competition is a modern version of one of the world's oldest tennis tournaments, the U.S. National Championship, which began in August 1881 with men's singles and men's doubles. It is currently played in the USTA Billie Jean King Nation Tennis Center in New York City.
Since 1987, the US Open has been regarded as the year's fourth and final Grand Slam tournament. The Australian Open, French Open, and Wimbledon are the other three, in chronological order. The US Open begins on the final Monday in August and runs for two weeks, with the middle weekend falling on Labor Day weekend in the United States.
There are five main championships in the tournament: men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles, and mixed doubles. Senior, junior, and wheelchair competitions are also part of the tournament. The tournament has been held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens, since 1978, on acrylic hard courts. The United States Tennis Association (USTA), a non-profit corporation, owns and organizes the US Open, and Patrick Galbraith serves as its chairperson. Tennis in the United States is developed through revenue from ticket sales, sponsorships, and broadcast contracts.
In every set of a singles match at the US Open, regular 7-point tiebreakers are used. For the other three Grand Slam events, there are special scoring methods for matches that reach 6–6 in the last possible set (the third for women and the fifth for men): in the French Open, the decisive set continues until a player takes a two-game lead, in Australia, an extended tiebreaker to 10 points is played, and at Wimbledon, a standard tiebreaker is played only if the game score reaches 1–6. Those tournaments, like the US Open, use tiebreakers to decide the other sets.
