Subscribe
Follow Us
World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka hasn't gotten her hands on a Grand Slam title in 2025, but she has still been far and away the best and most consistent player on there WTA tour in 2025. The Belarusian superstar remains the top-ranked player in the world and in the race to the WTA Finals and leads the tour in wins this season, and her clutch performance has been a big reason.
Sabalenka is already the best in the world on normal points, but she has also been nearly impossible to beat in tiebreaks this season. On Monday, with a win in the first-set tiebreak against Emma Raducanu in the third round of the Cincinnati Open, Sabalenka improved to 17-1 in tiebreaks this season.
Those 17 victories in end-of-set shootouts mark a new WTA single-season record, according to OptaAce.
“Aryna Sabalenka has won 17 WTA-level tie breaks in 2025, it is the highest tally in a single entire calendar year during the Open Era in Women's Singles,” OptaAce wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Sabalenka continued to build on that and dominate the biggest moments on Monday. A marathon third set saw Sabalenka and Raducanu head into a deciding third-set tiebreak, which Sabalenka won to extend her winning streak to 16 breakers and improve to 18-1 in tiebreaks this season.
The World No. 1 is moving onto the fourth round in Cincinnati after a 7-6(4), 4-6, 7-6(5) victory over the No. 30 seed. Sabalenka will take on Jessica Bouzas Maneiro of Spain for a spot in the quarterfinals on Wednesday.
The three-time Grand Slam champion's only tiebreak loss of the season came all the way back on Feb. 9, when she was beaten by Ekaterina Alexandrova in a final set tiebreak in Doha. She has since won 15 busters in a row and is building an aura of inevitability when she gets into a shootout.
Sabalenka is defending her title in Cincinnati and will be doing the same at the U.S. Open in New York at the end of the month, so there is a lot of pressure on her to defend a big chunk of the points that make up her No. 1 ranking. If she continues to pull out close sets like she has all season and did once again on Monday, she will be very difficult to beat in the coming weeks.
