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The US Open tennis tournament is held every year, over a two week period at the end of August/beginning September. It is one of the longest running tennis tournaments in the world, going back as far as 1881. The tournament has five different championships, the men and women’s singles and doubles, and also the mixed doubles, and since 1978 the matches have been played on the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre in New York City, on a fast, acrylic hard court. This tournament differs slightly from the other Grand Slam events, in that final set tiebreaks are allowed. In the other events, the final set for both the men and women the match continues until someone wins by two games.

The US Open became the first Grand Slam event to install the Hawk Eye system (multiple high-speed video recording) in 2006, which allowed each player two challenges against the umpire and linesman’s calls. The success of this system has led to the allowance being increased to three challenges for the 2008 event, plus an extra challenge in a tiebreak situation.

This year’s tournament is now well under way, and US Open live broadcasts are being shown across the US television networks, and also some cable and satellite channels such as Eurosport. This year’s prize money is set at an impressive $1,500,000 for the winner (both men and women’s singles) and $750,000 for the runner up. There is also the option for the top three finalists to win a bonus prize, if they also came top in the previous Olympus US Open Series. If the winners of the Olympus series singles tournaments also win the US open singles, they each could take home a bonus of a further $1 million dollars.

The latest news from the 2008 US Open singles event is that the 2000 US Open Women’s Champion Lindsay Davenport, has knocked out Alisa Kleybanova to go through into the third round and Novak Djokovic, the No 3 seed and last year’s US Open runner-up has knocked out Arnaud Clement in straight sets, despite slightly twisting his ankle during play.

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