How to Play Tennis for Beginners Rules Scoring and Tips

Imagine pingpong, chess, and little bit of boxing thrown in, but move it outside and add in rackets. And you know what you got? You got the game of tennis. Look, if you're brand new to the sport, or you've been playing for while, but you want to understand the game better, this is the place to be. So, sit back, buckle up, cuz we're jumping on in. Let's start with the court. Think of the court like your battlefield. And right in the middle of the battlefield is the net that divides it into two. The back line is called the baseline and the narrow boundaries are the sidelines. And those smaller boxes up front, those are the service boxes and they'll matter when it comes to the serve. Now, in singles, you play inside the inside sidelines, but in doubles, the court gets wider. Now, here's the general rule. The ball must land inside the lines. And yes, if it touches the line, it still counts as in. Now, the goal of tennis is pretty simple. You want to hit the ball in such way that the other player cannot return it successfully. The point keeps going until someone either one they miss the ball, two, they hit the ball out by either hitting it wide or deep, or three, they hit it into the net, or four, the ball bounces twice on their side. If any of those things happen to you, well, then the other player wins the point. Now, scoring. This is where things can get really interesting, but don't worry, we're going to break this down to where it's simple and easy. So, it starts like this. In tennis, zero equals love. Now, why in the world would love equals zero? Well, the leading theories basically say that the French word for egg or the Dutch or the Flemish word for honor, all of them sound like love. And some way, shape or form, those words morphed into the English word love and it stuck. Now, the rest of the scoring goes 1530 40 game. All it really is is 1 2 3 and then the first person to get that fourth point wins the game. Now, know what you're thinking. Why in the world use 153040 game? Well, there's actually pretty cool reason for it. One theory states that back in medieval France when they played tennis, they would use clock to keep score. So the first point would go to 15 and the second point would be 30 and the third point would be 45 and then of course the final point would reset the score clock. Eventually that 45 got pushed down to 40 in order to account for deuce which is actually how we do it today. But instead of using the 40 to 45 we actually go deuce is 4040. If you win the point you have the advantage. If you win the next point, you win the game. If the other player happens to win the point, you're back down to deuce. And then you just have to battle it out until one of you wins two successive points. Games, sets, and matches. Now, in tennis, it's easy to understand, especially if we link it to another sport that lot of people know. Well, let's compare it to baseball. You see, right behind me, have baseball field. In the game of baseball, you're trying to win innings, and innings turn into games, and games turn into series. Well, the same thing is true in tennis. You're trying to win points in order to win game. You're trying to win games in order to win set, and you're trying to win sets in order to win the match. So, we already talked about the points. You have 15, 30, 40, and game. But what about sets? set is typically comprised of the first to six games. Of course, you still have to win by two. We'll talk about that later. But in general, you are trying to race to be the first to get to six games. So, set could end up 6 or 6 love, 61, 62, 63, or 64. It can't end 65 because like we said earlier, you do have to win by two. What that means is that we're going to have to keep on playing games until one of two things happen. Either one, one of us gets to 75 or we tie up at 66. If we tie up at 66, we go into tiebreaker. Whoever wins that tie breaker wins the set. Now, if we're only playing one set to six games, congratulations, you've won the match. But most matches are the best of three sets. So, if you win that first set, well, then we reset and then we have another race to six. If you win the second set, well, you've won the best two of three. Therefore, you won the match. But if win, well, then it's one set to one set, which means we need to play third set. Now, believe it or not, at the major tournaments, they actually play the best of five sets. In fact, the longest five set match ever played was back in 2010 where they played at Wimbledon for 11 hours and five minutes. Serving and rallying. Basically, to begin each point, you're going to start by serving. And what you're going to do is you're going to stand on the right side. You're going to toss the ball up and hit it over into the diagonal service box on the other side. And that's how you start the point. If you miss that box, well then it's called fault. But guess what? You get second turn. So you get to do another serve. If you miss that second serve, well then it's double fault and you lose the point and then you switch sides. So the way game works is you are simply going to start on the right side. You're going to serve it diagonally. After that point's over, you are going to move over to the left side and serve it into the other service box. every point you will keep on switching. But to start off, just focus on hitting the ball cleanly and keeping it in play because believe it or not, you're going to win lot of matches just by getting the ball back. Now, quick word on serve rotation because yes, it matters. In singles, one player serves for the entire game, then the other player serves the next game, and you switch back and forth every game. But in doubles, all four players take turns. So each teammate serves once every four games and the rotation stays fixed once it's set. So for example, if I'm in doubles match, might start the match off serving and then in the next game my opponent serves and then for the third game my partner serves and then for the fourth game my opponent's partner serves and then it comes back to me. So in that match we're going to keep that pattern going the whole time. So, let's do quick recap of the must know rules. Number one, the ball must land in. And yes, lines do count. Number two, the ball can only bounce once. Now, it doesn't have to bounce once. can actually hit the ball out of the air, which is called volley, but the ball can't bounce more than once or else lose the point. Number three, cannot make contact with the net. If hit the ball and then my racket touches the net, then lose the point. Also, here's big one. cannot make contact with the ball over the net. can hit it on my side and then the racket path go over as long as don't touch the net. But if make contact over the net, well, then lose the point. Also, it is worth mentioning the racket has to be in your hand at the point of contact. So there's no throwing your racket at the tennis ball. And lastly, and this one's really funny because see it happen relatively frequently. If the ball's coming over the net and it hits me before it hits the ground, it is the opponent's point. see this play out sometimes. The opponent hits ball that's so far out and then the other player catches it before it actually hits the ground. Guess what? That is their point. If the ball's coming for you and it hasn't yet touched the ground, get out of the way, let it hit out or else you're going to lose that point. Now, here's the beautiful thing about tennis. There was study done not too long ago where they took whole bunch of activities and whole bunch of sports and they studied them out to see how they affected life expectancy. And guess what the number one sport was? You guessed it, it was tennis. It adds up to 9.7 years to your life. And to make it even better, you don't need anything special. Go out, grab cheap racket, get some tennis balls, put on your tennis shoes, find friend. Courts are typically free. It's great time to start playing tennis. Hey, look, hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, be sure to like and or subscribe. got lot more coming soon. And as usual, hope to see you on court soon.