“Going chalk” with your predictions isn’t always the worst play. After all, favorites are favored for a reason, and picking them to win can yield solid results. Particularly with single-elimination brackets like March Madness, “going chalk” is a reasonable strategy. It’s not like these seeds just come out of thin air.
If you’re a big proponent of going chalk, let me introduce you to the 2026 Australian Open Men’s Bracket, perhaps the most chalk event since the international chalk hopscotch-drawing championships. The fourth round did not include a single unseeded player, and the quarterfinals (the last 8) included the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th seeded players. Felix Auger-Aliassime, the 7th seed, withdrew due to injury in the first round.
Not only were the quarterfinals 87.5% chalk, every single higher seed won, leading to a 100% chalk semifinals, with the top four seeds cleanly in the last four spots. I cannot remember another bracket like this. It’s truly bizarre.
So, as if ordained by God and the fundamental rights of man and citizen, Carlos Alcaraz will play Alexander Zverev and Jannik Sinner will play Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals. Who is going to win? Here is the men’s final four ranked by their championship chan—
—actually no. Forget that. Every time I write this article, it is the same story: Alcaraz and Sinner will win their semifinal, and I have no earthly idea who will win the final. Yes, men’s tennis has been reduced to such a simple axiom. Ask the smartest tennis tsar you know; ask every other men’s player; ask God himself. It’s Sinner and Alcaraz, and I don’t know whose going to win between them. It’s The Duopoly, and if no one has coined that yet, consider it coined.
There you go. There’s your prediction. But I’m SICK of saying that.
Instead, we’re going to have a discussion about the state of each player’s career, how this tournament could affect their legacy, and a general discussion of the strange state of men’s tennis, which has just produced the most chalk event in its recent history. Because if all we did was predict the outcomes, I too would be going chalk.
There may actually be something interesting to say about Djokovic and Zverev, and it’s a shame they aren’t playing each other because that would be an interesting match to predict. However, Djokovic has no chance of beating Carlos Alcaraz barring an injury. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have any fun!
Speaking of fun, here’s a fun fact: Novak Djokovic last won a set IN THE THIRD ROUND. “Wait, don’t you have to win three sets to advance to the next round?” you may be thinking? And yes, you do! But Djokovic’s fourth-round opponent withdrew before the match, leading to a walkover, and his quarterfinal opponent, Lorenzo Musetti, won the first two sets and then retired due to injury. Thus Djokovic is entering the semifinals after playing very little actual tennis. For a 38-year-old, that’s not a bad beat.
Last year, I often noted how Djokovic vs. Sinner/Alcaraz had interesting “now I am the master” type narratives, where the young destroyers had to defeat the Greatest of All Time in order to cement themselves. But we’re way past that. Alcaraz and Sinner have won the last eight Grand Slams — there is no master/apprentice anymore. The master is in de facto retirement and we are living in a board-certified duopoly.
Eventually, Novak is going to look around and realize he has no chance of ever winning another Grand Slam and hang up his tennis shoes. I’m not going to tell him when that is, because he is still capable of beating basically-anyone other than the top two — though Musetti had him beat before the injury. And Djokovic is a tennis fanatic. If he wants to keep playing until his strings snap, I won’t tell him to stop.
I’ve come full circle on Zverev as men’s tennis’ great wildcard. In his early career, I thought he was the perfect modern player: super tall with a huge serve but tremendous mobility and ball striking. The late 2010s saw giants like Zverev overwhelm their competition, and it really looked like the 6’5”+ serve-bot revolution was on its way.
But Djokovic stymied the early revolution, and then Alcaraz and Sinner went full Thermidor on it by saying “what if we hit huge serves AND had better ground strokes and net game than anyone else ever?” When you put it like that, Zverev kind of just got left behind.
He’s had a bizarre career, perennially ranked third and actually made two major finals in the last two years. But never once did I feel like he would actually win it, and I used to be satisfied that I had clocked Zverev as second-tier even before Alcaraz and Sinner made that clear. Now it’s kind of just sad.
He actually has won more career prize money than Sinner, though that is likely to flip soon, and Zverev’s career may be that he was men’s tennis’ walking inflection point. His rise coincided with the end of the Triumvirate (Djokovic, Federer, Nadal) and his prime saw the rise of the Duopoly (Alcaraz, Sinner). Zverev may have been very successful in another era, but it’s not this one.
T1: “The Duopoly” — Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner
Imagine if we discovered life on another planet, and human society had blossomed there as well, but preliminary observations noted that the planet’s only real difference was that the athletes weren’t very good. Having learned the lessons of imperialism, we don’t interfere with their internal affairs, except for one, single, totally-worth-it joke: we send two of our athletes undercover to go destroy their domestic men’s tennis scene. It would be killer reality TV.
Except guess what: that’s us. We’re in the reality TV show. The Duopoly, Sinner and Alcaraz, are the aliens, and we’re all the butt of an intergalactic joke. Yeah, we have reached the point where I am not even going to discuss these guys individually; rather, I will consider them as a single entity from outer space, an interstellar-shapeshifting-superpowered slug creature whose sole purpose is to dominate men’s tennis on earth.
Their dominance has tested the lengths to which critical thinking can go to explain sports. Sure, I could talk to you about spin rate on forehands, average first serve speed and net-point percentage. I could come up with a million numerical reasons why Alcaraz and Sinner can’t lose to anyone but each other, but nothing will convince you of that more than just watching them play.
It’s just not the same sport. They hit the ball harder, more accurately, have more stamina, and simply understand the geography of the court intuitively. No one else has access to their tools, and thus, there is no other defensible choice to win it all.
Every time I write this, I am reminded that, at some point, one of these guys will lose in a semifinal again. It will happen, it will be shocking, and then that guy will promptly lose to the other member of The Duopoly in the Final. My long-term project of getting an American man a Grand Slam title in my lifetime is looking dark; if it was a monopoly, maybe we could get lucky. But The Duopoly squashes all competition.
Why do I refuse to pick a winner? Because I’m being honest with you. There is no data that suggests one of these guys has a better chance of beating the other on this surface or that surface. I have tried to use my eyes and brain to figure out which guy is favored in the past, and I was wrong the last two times — I said Alcaraz had the advantage on grass and Sinner was coming off an injury during Wimbledon… and Sinner won, and I said that Sinner is unbeatable on hardcourt during the US Open… and Alcaraz won.
Utterly defeated, I have turned to honesty to save us: I don’t know who’s going to win, because it’s a Duopoly. There is no choice, only the illusion of it.
