In all sporting disciplines, certain players are specialists in “anti-gaming”: without ever transgressing the rules, they gain time and destabilize their opponents by sometimes going completely against the spirit of sport. Men’s football is often the first example that comes to mind in this area, but according to the New York Times sports magazine, The Athletic, in tennis too, antiplay is an art.
In the women’s championship, German player Laura Siegemund, for example, has earned a reputation as one of the toughest opponents in the sport. On July 6, 2025, during her match against Argentina’s Solana Sierra – a 21-year-old player narrowly drafted after a forfeit and playing in her first round of 16 in a Grand Slam – she arrived at the match five minutes late, leaving her opponent to wait alone and visibly embarrassed.
From the start of the match, the German player demonstrated that she was one of the slowest on the circuit, taking as much time as possible between points and pausing for a few seconds on each serve. She also frequently changed rackets, which disrupted her opponent’s rhythm. “I think part of his game is figuring out how to irritate the other person a little.”declared Naomi Osaka about Laura Siegemund in 2018. The latter holds a degree in psychology, which leads WTA insiders (the main sports association organizing professional women’s tennis competitions around the world) to say that this helps her to decipher her opponents and anticipate their reactions.
Anti-gaming in tennis can also appear to some people as a way of questioning the starification of great players. An argument used to describe in particular certain behaviors of Robin Söderling against one of the best players in the world, Rafael Nadal. In 2007 at Wimbledon, the Swedish player played on the champion’s nerves by making fun of his slow play and his habit of fiddling with his clothes at every throw. Two years later, he became the first man to beat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros: “We have to destabilize these players and defend ourselveshe declared in an interview. Show your opponent that you believe in yourself and that you are there to win.”
Save time
Lukáš Rosol was just as aggressive towards Rafael Nadal during his surprise victory at Wimbledon in 2012. The player then went so far as to knock over the Spaniard’s carefully stored water bottles during a change of sides at the London tournament two years later. The Czech was then already known for his Machiavellian talents in anti-gambling, which made Scottish player Andy Murray say during a match at the Munich Open: “No one likes you on the circuit. Everyone hates you.”
The big players, however, indulge in antigaming just as much as the smaller ones. So the 25-second “service clock” was introduced in 2018 largely because of Nadal’s lengthy rituals between points. For his part, Novak Djokovic has long mastered the art of sowing doubt in a player’s mind about his physical condition and mental state, when in reality he is perfectly calm.
“Medical downtime” (MTO for Medical Time Out) and toilet breaks are thus two of the most used and most controversial anti-play techniques in tennis. Their purpose is to allow players to seek treatment and leave the court if necessary, but they also allow the more cunning to disrupt the rhythm of their opponents. Very regularly, players accuse each other of taking MTO without really needing it.
When it comes to bathroom breaks, the most famous incident was the one between Andy Murray and Stefanos Tsitsipas during the 2021 US Open. After Stefanos Tsitsipas went to the bathroom for eight minutes, Andy Murray said he had “lost all respect” for his opponent, before tweeting: “The fact of the day. It takes Stefanos Tsitsipas twice as long to go to the toilet as it does for Jeff Bazos (sic) to go into space. Interesting.”
Some of Stefanos Tsitsipas’ teammates then defended him by pointing out that anti-gaming incidents often highlight problems with the rules, rather than with the players. The following year, the ATP introduced a new rule limiting players to just one toilet break per match, lasting no more than three minutes, to be taken only at the end of a set.
