Professional players at a pickleball exhibition during the Miami Open, 27 March 2024. Photo: Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The short answer: Not yet, but it is closer than it looks. Anna Leigh Waters has not lost a professional singles match since 30 May 2024. By 4 November, the middle of the World Championships in Dallas, that will be 888 days. She has won at least 138 matches in a row and lost six games in that time. Esther Vergeer’s 470 wins and Jahangir Khan’s 555 are still longer. But nobody in a major racket sport has dropped fewer games over this many matches against professionals, so the honest verdict is that this is the most dominant streak racket sport has seen, and only time stands between it and the greatest.
The last time it happened, it was late. At about 10:30pm on 30 May 2024, in the semi-finals of the CIBC Texas Open, Anna Leigh Waters lost a singles match to Salome Devidze. The Dink’s Erik Tice pinned down the time, which tells you something on its own: in professional pickleball, a Waters singles loss is now a historical event, with a timestamp to match.
The run reaches its 888th day on 4 November, during the 2026 World Championships at Brookhaven Country Club, where the PPA has made her the top seed again.
The numbers, properly counted
Start with what is documented. By The Dink’s count on 27 May 2026, Waters had won 124 consecutive singles matches. She had won 250 games and lost six, a game-winning rate of 97.65%. She had won 25 consecutive singles titles. She had handed out 28 “pickles”, games in which her opponent scored nothing. Her most frequent victims were Kate Fahey (16 defeats), Parris Todd (11) and Lea Jansen (8), with Brooke Buckner and Kaitlyn Christian on seven each. Almost 40% of those wins, 49 of 124, came against players seeded in the top six.
WPM has extended that count using the official results compiled on picklefitter for the three singles events she has entered since. At the National Championships in Cary in September, she beat five players and lost no games; Fahey took nine points in the second game of the final, which counts as a contest. At the Arizona Open she won four matches without dropping a game. At the Chicago Cup in October she won five more, again without dropping a game, finishing 11-1, 11-7 against Fahey in the final. That makes 14 matches and 28 games since The Dink’s tally, and she lost none of them.
That takes the streak to at least 138 matches. It is a number worth sitting with. Chris Evert’s famous clay-court streak, from 1973 to 1979, ended at 125. Magnus Carlsen’s unbeaten run in classical chess, often cited in these debates even though it is not a racket sport, also ended at 125, though 83 of those were draws. Waters has passed both.
The six lost games deserve their own list, because there are so few of them. Buckner won one, 11-9, in the Virginia Beach final in October 2024, and another, 11-9, in the Mesa Cup final in February 2025. Fahey won 11-7 in the Atlanta final in May 2025 and 11-8 in the Greater Zion Cup final in March 2026. Christian won 11-9 in a Masters semi-final in January 2026. Kunimoto won 11-7 in an Atlanta semi-final in May 2026. Five of the six came in finals. The only way to take a game off Waters, it seems, is to reach Sunday first.
Golf offers a useful comparison. Byron Nelson’s 11 consecutive tournament wins in 1945, which The Dink also cites, are still treated as untouchable eighty years later. Waters’ 25 consecutive singles titles to May, and the Cary, Arizona and Chicago titles added since, make that run look short. Golf and pickleball are not the same kind of test, of course. Nelson had to beat a whole field over 72 holes, while Waters needs to beat five or six opponents one at a time. Still, the principle is the same: win every event you enter for a year or more, against everyone who turns up, and keep doing it. Nelson did it for about five months. Waters has been doing it for more than two years.
The case against
A firm argument needs to deal with the strongest objection, and there are three.
The first is selection. Waters does not play every event. The Dink counted 42 PPA events held since the loss and found she did not enter singles at 17 of them. Fahey won seven of those, including the PPA Finals, Christian four, Todd three, Buckner two and Catherine Parenteau one. Her pattern, as The Dink notes, is to skip the smaller Opens. She did not play singles at Las Vegas or Hong Kong this autumn. A streak built partly by choosing when to defend it is not a lesser streak, but it is a different one.
The second is depth. Women’s professional pickleball singles is young. Several of its leading players are converts from tennis. A sceptic would say Waters is dominating a field that has not yet had a generation to grow. That is partly true. It was also said of Navratilova in 1984 and of Khan in squash in the early 1980s. Every great streak has been accused of beating a weak era, and every one of those eras looked strong once the streak had ended.
The third is format. Pickleball singles is played to 11 with side-out scoring, so only the server can score. That should, in theory, make upsets easier, because a short game gives a hot opponent less time to be found out. This objection works against the sceptics. Shorter contests are more random, so a long streak in a short format is the harder thing to sustain.
Against the canon
Here is the comparison set WPM considers relevant, on documented figures.
- Jahangir Khan (squash): 555 consecutive matches, 1981–86, the number usually quoted for the longest winning run in professional sport.
- Esther Vergeer (wheelchair tennis): 470 consecutive wins from 2003 to 2013, retiring unbeaten. The Dink notes she lost 18 sets in that time, winning 98.12% of sets.
- Chris Evert (tennis, on clay): 125 consecutive matches, 1973–79.
- Martina Navratilova (tennis): 74 consecutive matches in 1984. (The Dink’s piece gives both 74 and 84 in different places; 74 is the established record.)
- Anna Leigh Waters (pickleball singles): at least 138 matches and counting, 2024–26.
On length, Waters is third, and a long way behind Khan and Vergeer. On dominance per contest, the picture changes. Vergeer won 98.12% of her sets. Through May, Waters had won 97.65% of her games, and has since added 28 more without dropping one. Games are smaller units than sets: a player who wins most sets will drop more games than sets, so Waters’ figure is the harder one to sustain. On that measure she is at least level with the best wheelchair tennis player in history, and probably ahead.
Then there is the finals record. Todd Boss, writing in Forbes after the Chicago Cup, noted it was Waters’ 14th win in 14 finals against Fahey. Results compiled by ICNX put her at 55 consecutive singles finals won since June 2022. Some streaks are built on avoiding the best players in the final. This one has been built by beating the second-best player every time.
What the players say
Zane Navratil, a top men’s player and one of the sport’s sharpest analysts, has said, as quoted by The Dink, that Waters is more dominant in pickleball than Serena Williams ever was in tennis. Coming from a man who makes his living reading the game, that is not a casual claim. It is still a claim: Serena’s era did not have one player losing six games in two and a half years.
Waters’ rivals have been less philosophical and more practical. Fahey, who has lost to her more than anyone, keeps reaching finals. Buckner and Christian, who have taken three of the six games between them, keep losing them. The streak has not discouraged the field. It has organised it. Every serious women’s singles player now prepares to beat one person.
Why the streak matters for the sport
Waters has been world No.1 since 15 March 2022, according to The Dink. She has more than 200 professional titles, by ICNX’s count. Her doubles and mixed careers, with Bright and Ben Johns, would make anyone’s reputation. So why does the singles streak matter more?
Because singles is the format the outside world understands. A tennis fan does not need mixed doubles positioning explained to them. They understand one player, one court, nobody to share the credit or the blame. As pickleball tries to persuade broadcasters and sponsors that it has stars, the singles streak is the clearest piece of evidence. Nobody has to explain it.
It also travels. Waters played her first Malaysian showcase in October, and the PPA Tour Asia calendar for 2027 starts in Bangkok and Manila. Asia’s crowds have now seen Waters live. An undefeated record travels as easily as a highlight clip, and further. For a sport trying to build audiences in Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur, a player who never loses in singles is the easiest product to sell. Whether the streak ends in Dallas or survives into 2027, it has already done that job.
How it ends
Every streak ends, usually at the hands of someone nobody named in advance. Devidze was not the favourite in May 2024. Vergeer retired before anyone could beat her. Khan lost to Ross Norman in the 1986 World Open final, a match few predicted.
Waters’ streak is most at risk in exactly the setting she now faces: a big event, a best-of-three format, and a draw full of players who have nothing to lose. Fahey is the second seed in Dallas. Christian, who took a game off her in January, is third. Buckner, the only player to take two games off her during the streak, is fourth. If anyone ends it, they will probably have done what Buckner and Christian already have: win a game, then do it again.
Verdict
Is it the greatest streak in racket sport? Not yet. Khan’s 555 and Vergeer’s 470 combined length and dominance across a whole career, and Waters is not even a third of the way to Khan. But she has passed Evert and is close to Vergeer on dominance, in a sport whose scoring makes upsets more likely, not less. Give her two more years of this and the debate is over. For now: it is the most dominant streak racket sport has seen, and only time stands between it and the greatest.
Methodology: match and game counts through 27 May 2026 are from The Dink (Erik Tice). Results since then are from published results on picklefitter.com for the PPA National Championships, Arizona Open and Chicago Cup. Comparison figures are as reported by The Dink unless otherwise stated.
