As announced earlier, a new feature is added: the CUT for each tournament. The Challengers are not affected, but maybe one day they will if they're too crowded and we'll need to add some Futures :) A CUT means that the number of players allowed to compete for a tournament is limited. The limit is the same as the one used for the ATP tournament. For instance Cincinnati 2019 has a a CUT of 56 players, but 60 LLTL players have participated. Which means that 4 players wew supposed to play another lower tournament the same week. Priority is of course (or unfortunately) given to the higher ranked players. You can check the CUT of a tournament here :

What a wonderful picture
We'll try this feature next week, with Winston-Salem, the longest ATP250 of the year. I think the Cut will be useless, since it will be hard to find 48 players to join an ATP250 when there is in addition a Challenger the same week. 48 players maximum will be allowed to play at Winston-Salem, the others (except Top10) will be redirected to a Challenger.

This feature will become really important for the next M1000. In Shanghai the cut is set to 56 players, and only 48 players in Paris-Bercy.

The big question is: how is that really gonna work? Let's imagine you're ranked 50 (shame on you!) and you want to join the Paris M1000, which is limited to 48 players. Two options:
- the DEADLINE of the Challenger is AFTER the one of the M1000 => no problem, you can try to play the M1000. And if too many players have joined the M1000, your bet will be deleted, and you'll have few hours to join the Challenger. We'll try (no guarantee!) to send an email to the players kicked out.
- the DEADLINE of the Challenger is BEFORE the M1000 => well, you'll have to make a choice. You can try to play the M1000, but if the CUT is reached (which means that 48 players among the 49 players with a better rank than you have played) you'll be kicked out. And it will be too late to join the Challenger.

It's important to remember that the rankings used for the CUT are those from the week before the 1st day of the tournament. Which means that even if new rankings are generated a few hours before the deadline of the new tournament, we'll use the rankings of the previous week.

Of course we'll try to put the deadlines of smaller tournaments AFTER the big one, as much as possible. Which is the case usually. But you never know what could happen with the different formats, dates, and weather troubles... We'll try to keep you informed by email (no spam :))...