ATP Champions Tour
The "ATP Champions Tour" is a men's tennis tour intended for former tennis professionals, who have since retired from mainstream professional tennis touring (The ATP). The Tour brings together many of the greatest tennis players in history for nostalgic, competitive and entertaining tournaments in cities in all five continents around the world. For a player to be eligible for play on this tour, he must be in the year of his 35th birthday or have been retired from the ATP World Tour for two years or more. Each player must have been either a world #1, a Grand Slam finalist, or a singles player in a winning Davis Cup team. Each event can also invite two players of its choice to take wild cards. The Tour usually consists of around 10 events around the world, with a year-ending "AEGON Masters Tennis" event held at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Events are typically played over four days with eight-man fields competing against each other in a round-robin format, ensuring that all players feature in at least three matches. The players are split into two groups of four. The top player from each group contests the final, while the two players who finish second in each group play off for third and fourth places respectively. Matches are contested over the best of three sets, with the deciding set taking the form of a Champions tie-break. The Champions tie-break is an expanded version of the conventional professional tennis tie-break, whereby the winner is the first player to reach 10 points and lead by a margin of 2.
Rankings points on the Tour are distributed as follows: Winner: 400 / Runner-up: 300 / 3rd place: 200 / 4th place: 150 / No. 5-6: 80 / No. 7-8: 60 points.
Notable participants, in past and present, are: John McEnroe, Björn Borg, Mats Wilander, Henri Leconte, Pete Sampras, Mansour Bahrami, and Tim Henman.
Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker, Jim Courier, Pete Sampras, Thomas Muster, Marcelo Ríos, Goran Ivanišević, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Patrick Rafter, Ivan Lendl, Carlos Moyá, and most recently Jimmy Connors have all participated.
Read more about ATP Champions Tour: Participants, Year-end Number 1, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
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