The court is divided into two halves: the service side, where every point begins, and the hazard side, where the serve is returned. To be valid, a serve must strike the side wall of the hazard-side penthouse before bouncing into play; miss the penthouse, and you’ve lost a fault. On the hazard side, a lined rectangle near the back wall defines a zone where the rules of modern tennis apply: if the ball’s second bounce lands there, the receiver loses the point outright. Everywhere else, on both sides of the court, a second bounce doesn’t automatically decide a point. Instead, play stops and the exact spot of the second bounce — indicated on the floor by a grid of hash marks, some numbered, some, confusingly, lettered — is recorded as a “chase.” Chases are replayed later, after a change of ends, which occurs either when two chases have been set in a single game, or when one chase has been set and one player has reached game point (the scoring system is identical to that of modern tennis). In that replay, the player who conceded the chase — that is, the one who failed to reach the ball before it bounced twice — must now hit a shot that forces a second bounce on their opponent’s side deeper than where that original chase was marked.
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