Will the quarterfinal hex be broken Down Under?

When the Australian Open men’s singles draw is made this week, take note of where Andrey Rublev and hometown favorite Alex de Minaur are placed this year. The insidious Grand Slam quarterfinal hex weighs heavily on both men.

Accomplished as they are, frequent guests in the prestigious “second week” of majors, neither man has ever contested a semifinal. At the 2024 Australian Open, they met in the fourth round. Had it been one round later, the hex would have been lifted for the winner. Instead, No. 5 seed Rublev prevailed over de Minaur in a brutal five-setter, then lost in the quarters to the new Italian star. Jannik Sinner.

It was Rublev’s 10th unsuccessful quarterfinal. The 28-year old Russian hasn’t gone that deep since, and his ranking is down to No. 16.

Repeated failures in major quarterfinals hearkens to that hoary question, “Is a glass half full—or half empty?” For first or second-time quarterfinalists, it is most decidedly half-full. But for those who have repeatedly failed to advance, like Rublev or de Minaur, the glass is painfully, even glaringly, half-empty.

Rublev’s 10 successive quarterfinal misfires, which started with a brilliant run as a 19-year old at the 2017 US Open, is the all-time record. De Minaur is slowly catching up, with six misfires since his first—also in New York—in 2020. At the time, those early-career fails seemed  harbingers of greater things to come. Instead, repeated dismissals have left both players frustrated and, at least in Rublev’s case, despondent.

“I wanted it so badly that I couldn’t handle the pressure during the matches,” Rublev said following his most recent 2024 setback. ”I was not really playing, I was completely tight and full of negative emotions that, in the end, it was not even giving me chances to win a match. ... I lost [all] those [quarterfinal] matches because of myself.”

De Minaur’s most recent quarterfinal exit happened at the 2025 US Open, where he lost to Felix Auger-Aliassime. He has less to beat himself up about, and much less inclination by nature to do so than the emotional Rublev. The 27-year old Aussie, currently ranked No. 7, shrugged off that last defeat as a “wasted opportunity,” insisting that he doesn’t consider Grand Slam quarterfinals his  “glass ceiling.”

I lost [all] those [quarterfinal] matches because of myself. Andrey Rublev

De Minaur’s cool attitude is praiseworthy, but the quarterfinal hex still demands respect. It has tested the faith of many fine players, not all of whom have overcome it. There’s something about that round at a major that demands more of a player. The round is a hinge point—the chasm between the fourth round and the semis wider than the previous rounds. There’s a reason that the majors offer past quarterfinalists amenity-laden membership in“Final Eight” clubs. By then, the merely lucky have been weeded out. The draws are dominated by elites.

The list of quality players who never made it through the quarterfinal vetting process also includes Tommy Robredo and Carla Suarez Navarro (seven quarterfinals without a semi, each), Nicolas Almagro, Feliciano Lopez (each with four). Yet when a player breaks the hex, it is forgotten as easily as if it never existed.  Jessica Pegula was 0-6 before she made a major semi, and Taylor Fritz absorbed four consecutive quarterfinal beatings before he won one.

Fritz made his breakthrough at the 2024 US Open with a quarterfinal win over Alexander Zverev. He had been able to rationalize his first three failures because he was beaten by Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic (twice). But when he was beaten in his fourth chance by Italian newcomer Lorenzo Musetti he recognized he had a problem, telling himself: “OK, maybe that excuse doesn’t work for me anymore.”

Fritz went on to say,:“To someone like Novak, the quarterfinals is the same. It holds the same weight as the second round, the third round, whatever. It's just common—you're used to it. Before, being in the quarterfinals was like a ‘Wow! I’m in the quarterfinals’ moment. But after a while, being deep in a Slam becomes more of a dull feeling, so you can just treat it much more like any other match.”

Pegula’s sixth—and most painful—quarterfinal letdown occurred at Wimbledon in 2023. She lost to Marketa Vondrousova after leading  4-1 in the third set, with a break point to go up 5-1, when rain interrupted play. When the match resumed under the roof, Vondrousova ran off five games on the trot to win. She would go on to claim all the marbles.

Pegula admitted afterward that after losing a few quarterfinals, it was easy to lose faith, to focus on the negative. Through her failures she kept reminding herself that she was putting herself into “good positions.”  When a reporter asked Pegula if there was a piece of “the jigsaw” missing, she replied:  “There's not, like, a clear answer for everything, or something to make me say, ‘Now, if I do this, for sure I’m going to win a Grand Slam, make the semis, make finals.’ There’s nothing like that.”

She didn’t need to say that if there were clear answers, it wouldn’t be called a hex.