US Open 2026 Second Week: $550,000 Went on Taylor Fritz, and Francisco Cerundolo Sent Every Dollar of It Home

UPDATE, 11 September: the tournament moved on and so did the story. Ben Shelton beat Carlos Alcaraz at three in the morning to end the defending champion’s title defence, and Sabalenka meets Rybakina in Saturday’s final. Read the quarter-final and semi-final ledger. The three Taylor Fritz tickets below are still pending six days after that match finished.

The whale room made its read on the fourth round early and it made it loudly. Across two days it put $549,993 on Taylor Fritz to beat Francisco Cerundolo, in five separate tickets, at prices between 1.12 and 1.55. Cerundolo lost the first two sets and won the next three, 3-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, and the ninth seed went out.

Two of those tickets have already graded as losses: $125,000 at 1.13 and $200,000 at 1.55, the second placed on Saturday evening with the match in front of him. Three more, $75,000, $75,000 and $74,993, are still sitting pending while settlement catches up. Tennis grades slowly at this tournament and pending is not a verdict, but there is only one way that cluster ends.

A $38.8M book, and it is not finished

Since the draw opened on 25 August, 1,232 tickets carrying $38,804,436 have gone through the two singles draws. That makes the 2026 US Open the largest tennis book in the tail.bet archive by some distance, and it has three days left to run. Add the previous editions we hold and US Open singles now stands at 1,392 tickets and $43.53M all time.

The money did not spread evenly. Week one took $32.1M across 1,022 tickets, a torrent of odds-on first-round money into a draw that had lost its world number one before a ball was struck. The second week has been narrower and sharper: 210 tickets, $6,683,462, and a far higher share of it on players who then lost.

Of the settled tickets from this edition, 601 have won and 414 have lost, with another 134 cashed out and 72 still pending. That is a 59.2% strike rate, comfortably above the site-wide 55.6%, and it flatters the position. Most of those winners are 1.05 to 1.25 favourites returning a few percent. The losers are the six-figure ones.

Sunday’s fourth round, ticket by ticket

The board going into Sunday tells you exactly where the conviction sits.

Aryna Sabalenka against Taylor Townsend carries $225,000 across three tickets, one, two and three, all placed within three hours of each other on Saturday night and all pending. Sabalenka at 1.17 is a leg in each: they are seven-, ten- and seven-leg parlays priced at 3.23, 4.30 and 2.74 combined, not straight bets on the match. Sabalenka reached the last 16 by beating Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3, 6-4 without facing a break point. Townsend is unseeded and ranked outside the top 90, and three separate accumulators need that gap to hold.

Carlos Alcaraz against Tommy Paul has drawn almost nothing by comparison. The defending champion, four months out with a wrist injury and then straight through the draw, has yet to attract a ticket bigger than $40,000 at this tournament. The two on his fourth round are $19,999 on Over 34.5 total games and $14,999 on him to win a set at 1.02. Alcaraz beat Wu Yibing 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 to get here.

Naomi Osaka carried $50,000 at 1.13 to win a set into her meeting with Elise Mertens, which she won 6-3, 3-6, 7-5.

Elsewhere on Saturday the money was better. $150,000 at 1.60 on Learner Tien to beat Jakub Mensik returned $240,024, the biggest clean win of the second week. $130,000 on Alexander Zverev to take the second set against Alejandro Tabilo returned $169,017 as the top seed finally got through a match without going five. And a pair of Frances Tiafoe tickets, $140,958 at 1.51 and $144,821 at 1.22, returned $212,889 and $176,717 against Valentin Vacherot.

The expensive misses

The largest women’s ticket ever captured at this tournament also went down this week: $263,775 on Maria Sakkari at 1.20, beaten by Yulia Starodubsteva. On Friday, $149,970 on Ben Shelton to cover a 2.5-set handicap against Denis Shapovalov lost, even though two smaller Shelton tickets on the same match won. $110,000 on Karolina Muchova went out against Emma Navarro. $124,000 on Jiri Lehecka went out against Stefanos Tsitsipas.

The single biggest ticket of the whole edition remains a week-one one: $358,310 on Arthur Gea at 1.10, which returned $394,141 for a $35,831 profit. It is the shape of the entire book in one bet, a third of a million dollars risked to make the price of a used car.

The draw that keeps rearranging itself

Jannik Sinner withdrew on 21 August with a right-knee injury, his first missed major since 2019, handing Zverev the top seed. Zverev then spent 9 hours 26 minutes on court getting through his first two rounds, beating Lorenzo Sonego 6-4, 3-6, 6-7(7), 7-5, 6-4 and Quentin Halys 6-4, 4-6, 7-6(3), 6-7(3), 6-3, the second finishing after two in the morning. Whales backed him through both: $166,320 at 1.10 on the Halys match returned $182,952.

Novak Djokovic, seeded fourth and chasing a 25th major, lost in the first round to Mariano Navone. Reports have it as his first opening-round exit at a Grand Slam in twenty years.

On the women’s side, sixteen-year-old Iva Jovic beat Alexandra Eala 7-5, 3-6, 7-5 across three hours to make a first fourth round and drew Coco Gauff, who came through Cristina Bucsa 6-3, 6-4. Iga Swiatek needed two tiebreaks to get past Marie Bouzkova. Elena Rybakina is into the second week and closing on the top ranking. Qinwen Zheng beat Madison Keys from a set and a break down, and the whale money split neatly: $49,995 on Zheng to take the second set at 2.30 returned $115,000, while $40,000 on Keys lost.

What is left, and what the market thinks

Women’s semi-finals are Thursday 10 September. Men’s semi-finals are Friday 11 September at 3pm and 7pm Eastern. The women’s final is Saturday 12 September at 4pm, the men’s Sunday 13 September at 2pm. The champions collect $5.5 million each from a $108 million prize pool, a record for the sport and roughly a fifth larger than last year’s.

A DraftKings prediction market snapshot taken on 5 September had Alcaraz at 52% to win the men’s title, Zverev 21% and Ben Shelton 14%. On the women’s side, Sabalenka 28%, Gauff 21% and Swiatek 15%. For scale, a Kalshi read from 27 August, just after the draw, had Alcaraz at 26%. His number has doubled in nine days without him dropping a set of consequence. Those are two products from the same operator rather than independent books, so read them as direction rather than gospel.

The tournament has had its off-court moment too. A first-round match on Arthur Ashe was briefly stopped by the chair umpire over noise from credentialed content creators filming in a suite, in a year the USTA issued around 100 creator credentials against 54 the year before. Jessica Pegula and Daniil Medvedev both had something to say about it.

This piece follows the Day 1 ledger we published when the draw opened. Every graded ticket lives on the US Open hub, the men’s singles board and the women’s singles board. The rest of the September book is on the AFL finals and the NFL season opening in Melbourne. Before you tail any of it, check the bonus board. 18+ · gamble responsibly.

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Correction, 11 September 2026: this article originally described the three Sabalenka v Townsend tickets as “three separate $75,000 tickets at 1.17”. They are multi-leg parlays in which Sabalenka at 1.17 is one leg; the combined prices are 3.23, 4.30 and 2.74. The stakes and the $225,000 total were correct. Corrected in line with our corrections policy.