The US Open’s $1 million mixed doubles bet starts today

At eleven on Monday morning, eight mixed-doubles teams will play on Grandstand for the last two places in a sixteen-team draw where the winners split a million dollars. The matches are free with a Fan Access Pass. The singles main draw does not start for another six days. That gap is the whole product.

For decades, mixed doubles at Flushing Meadows was an afterthought tucked inside the singles fortnight: a thirty-two-team bracket that overlapped with quarterfinal night sessions and paid the champions $200,000 as recently as 2024. Last year the USTA moved it to Fan Week, cut the field in half, shortened the sets, and raised the winner’s cheque to $1 million. That is the same figure the men’s and women’s doubles champions collect for surviving a 64-team draw across six rounds and two weeks.

The scoring is built for speed. From qualifying through the semifinals, matches are best-of-three sets to four games with no-ad scoring and a 10-point tiebreak instead of a third set. Only the final, on Wednesday night in Ashe, uses six-game sets, and it still keeps no-ad and a 10-point decider. A pair can win the whole thing across two busy days — first round and quarterfinals Tuesday, semifinals and final Wednesday — and be off the grounds four days before singles play begins on Aug. 30.

The first run worked well enough that the tournament is doing it again. Seventy-eight thousand fans came to the grounds over the two main-draw days in 2025. Arthur Ashe Stadium sold out on both Tuesday and Wednesday. More than twenty thousand people scanned into Louis Armstrong for free early-round matches. ESPN averaged 343,000 viewers across its linear coverage, and the USTA said digital traffic on those days jumped more than 90 percent from the same Fan Week window in 2024. Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, the only true doubles specialists in the field, beat Iga Świątek and Casper Ruud in a 10-point match tiebreak to defend their title and collect the cheque.

Today’s qualifying round is this year’s concession. Doubles players had complained that the 2025 format — six direct entries based on combined singles ranking, plus eight wild cards handed out by the USTA — left almost no room for the pairs who play mixed for a living. Errani and Vavassori needed a wild card even as defending champions. So the USTA added an eight-team qualifier, and the entry list reads like a doubles leaderboard: Kateřina Siniaková with Henry Patten, Gabriela Dabrowski with Harri Heliövaara, Luisa Stefani with Neal Skupski, Aleksandra Krunić with Mate Pavić. Two of them get through.

The main draw that opens Tuesday is still built for star power. Serena Williams, returning to Flushing Meadows for the first time since 2022, drew a wild card to partner Carlos Alcaraz. The No. 1 seed went to Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic, who open against Leylah Fernandez and Frances Tiafoe. Americans Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz are seeded second after their previous partners withdrew with injuries. Amanda Anisimova and Learner Tien — the Vietnamese American lefty who enters the singles draw seeded after an Australian Open quarterfinal — are the No. 3 seeds and face Emma Navarro and Tommy Paul in the first round.

The rest of the bracket is unusually international for an American tournament’s warm-up act. Alexandra Eala, the Filipina who won her first WTA title in Washington this month, partners Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime against the married pair of Elina Svitolina and Gaël Monfils. Fernandez, whose mother is Filipino Canadian, drew the hardest opener available in Sabalenka and Djokovic. Pegula, whose mother was adopted out of Seoul as a small child, anchors the second seed line. None of these partnerships will exist again after Wednesday night, which is a good part of the appeal.

The money underneath has climbed too. The USTA announced a record $108 million player compensation package last Thursday, the first Grand Slam to pass $100 million, with singles champions taking $5.5 million each. Mixed doubles held its $1 million top prize and raised every rung below it: $500,000 for the runners-up, $250,000 for a semifinal, $120,000 for a quarterfinal, and $40,000 for a first-round loss, double what that paid last year. Even the pairs beaten in this morning’s qualifying leave with $10,000. The specialists spent last year arguing for a way into this tournament. The Grandstand draw is what they got.

Errani and Vavassori, going for a third straight title, open Tuesday against Mirra Andreeva and Andrey Rublev. Whoever survives Grandstand this morning gets Williams and Alcaraz or Muchova and Menšík — a qualifier’s reward for a good day’s work is a night match against the most photographed pairing in tennis. By Wednesday the USTA will know whether year two fills Ashe the way year one did, and whether a championship stocked almost entirely by invitation can keep being called one.