The Riyadh Season is a very popular event, or a series of events, held annually in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. While mostly sporting events, the Riyadh Season, which was first held in October 2019, also includes different entertainment and cultural events.
The Six Kings Slam is an exhibition tennis tournament that is part of the Riyadh Season. It's a brand-new event, first held in 2024, but it isn't the first tennis event to be part of the Riyadh Season, as tennis was part of it also in 2023.
In 2023, the Riyadh Season organizers created the Riyadh Season Tennis Cup, which was a series of two exhibition tennis matches. One was a women's match between Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur, and the other was a men's match between Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz.
While Sabalenka and Jabeur won't compete during the Riyadh Season in 2024, both of last year's men's protagonists will be part of the brand-new Six Kings Slam exhibition, and they will be joined by four other 'Kings' at the tournament in Saudi Arabia.
Rafael Nadal, Jannik Sinner, Daniil Medvedev, and Holger Rune are the other four players who were invited to compete in the inaugural edition of the Six Kings Slam, and they had a few very good reasons to agree to it.
Each player at the tournament is guaranteed to receive at least $1.5 million for participating in the event, while the 2024 Six Kings Slam champion will take home $6 million, which is nearly double what the 2024 US Open winners earned ($3,600,000).
The tournament is held from October 16th to 19th, with one rest day on October 18th. This is not by coincidence, as the ATP recently updated its rulebooks, which state that players can't compete in an exhibition that would last three consecutive days.
With six players competing, two had two receive a BYE into the semi-final round, with the remaining four players competing in the quarter-final stages, and obviously, it was Djokovic and Nadal who were seeded at the event.
Untraditionally for tennis events, the 2024 Six Kings Slam, which will be held at The Venue in Riyadh, with an 8,000-people seating capacity, will also feature a third-place match with two losing semi-finalists.
