<P> The United States Open Tennis Championships is a hard court tennis tournament . The tournament is the modern version of one of the oldest tennis championships in the world, the U.S. National Championship, for which men's singles was first played in 1881 . </P> <P> Since 1987, the US Open has been chronologically the fourth and final Grand Slam tournament of the year . The other three, in chronological order, are the Australian Open, the French Open, and Wimbledon . The US Open starts on the last Monday of August and continues for two weeks, with the middle weekend coinciding with the U.S. Labor Day holiday . </P> <P> The tournament consists of five primary championships: men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles, and mixed doubles . The tournament also includes events for senior, junior, and wheelchair players . Since 1978, the tournament has been played on acrylic hard courts at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows--Corona Park, Queens, New York City . The US Open is owned and organized by the United States Tennis Association (USTA), a non-profit organization, and the chairperson of the US Open is Katrina Adams . Revenue from ticket sales, sponsorships, and television contracts are used to develop tennis in the United States . </P> <P> The US Open is the only Grand Slam tournament that employs tiebreakers in every set of a singles match . For the other three Grand Slam events, a match that reaches 6--6 in the last possible set (the third for women and the fifth for men) continues until a player takes a two - game lead . As with the US Open, those events use tiebreakers to decide the other sets . </P>

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