Tournament Categories
- The current tournament structure was introduced in 2009. Premier Tournaments replaced the previous Tier I and Tier II events, and International Tournaments replaced Tier III and IV events.
- Grand Slam tournaments (4)
- Year-ending championships (WTA Tour Championships)
- Premier tournaments:
- Premier Mandatory: Four combined tournaments with male professional players, with U.S.$4.5 million in equal prize money for men and women. These tournaments are being held in Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, and Beijing.
- Premier Five: Five $2 million events in Dubai, Rome, Cincinnati, Toronto / Montreal, and Tokyo
- Premier: Ten events with prize money from U.S.$600,000 to U.S.$1 million.
- International tournaments: There are 31 tournaments, with a prize money for every event at U.S.$220,000, except for the year-ending Commonwealth Bank Tournament of Champions, originally held in Bali but now in Sofia, which has prize money of U.S.$600,000.
- Challenger tournaments (since 2012): There are 2 tournaments, with prize money for every event at U.S. $125,000.
Ranking points are also available at tournaments on the ITF Women's Circuit organised by the International Tennis Federation, which comprises several hundred tournaments each year with prize funds ranging from U.S. $10,000 to U.S. $100,000, and at the Olympic Games.
Read more about this topic: Women's Tennis Association
Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)