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Seventy-point tiebreak in Futures event

Benjamin Balleret's career high ATP ranking is No. 204. (Cyril Dodergny/Landov) It's not every day that you see a scoreline like this. During a qualifying
Courtney Nguyen|
Seventy-point tiebreak in Futures event
Seventy-point tiebreak in Futures event

Benjamin Balleret's career high ATP ranking is No. 204. (Cyril Dodergny/Landov)

It's not every day that you see a scoreline like this.

During a qualifying match at a $10,000 Futures event in Plantation, Fla., (tennis' version of Double-A ball) Benjamin Balleret, 29, and Guillaume Couilliard, 37, played a 70-point tiebreaker in which the 636th-ranked Balleret prevailed 36-34. You can forgive Couillard for falling away after that set and losing the second set 6-1.

Balleret and the unranked Coulliard both hail from Monaco, so I don't know, maybe this is just how they play tennis in The Principality? While no details are currently available as to how long it took to play out the tiebreaker, as Chris Chase at USA Today points out, the tiebreaker would have featured no fewer than 30 set points between the two. According to Wikipedia, the longest recorded ATP tiebreaker by points took place in a doubles match at Wimbledon in 1985, when Jan Gunnarsson and Michael Mortensen defeated John Frawley and Victor Pecci in a 50-point tiebreaker to win 6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6 (24).

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Courtney Nguyen
COURTNEY NGUYEN

Contributor, SI.com Nguyen is a freelance writer for SI.com, providing full coverage of professional tennis both on and off the court. Her content has become a must-read for fans and insiders to stay up-to-date with a sport that rarely rests. She has appeared on radio and TV talk shows all over the world and is one of the co-hosts of No Challenges Remaining, a weekly podcast available on iTunes. Nguyen graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received a law degree from the University of California, Davis in 2002. She lives in the Bay Area.

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