Racquet weight: strung or unstrung?

You find the perfect racquet in a US comparison: 318 g. Then a store listing in another market says the same racquet weighs 300 g. Who is wrong?

Nobody. Both numbers are correct — they just measure different things. This is one of the biggest sources of confusion for anyone researching racquets across markets, and understanding it prevents both buying the wrong frame and discarding the right one.

The two conventions

• Strung weight: the racquet ready to play, strings in. This is the convention of US catalogs and reviews — Tennis Warehouse, for example, publishes everything strung.
• Unstrung weight: the bare frame, as it leaves the factory. It is the number printed on the frame itself by the manufacturer and the convention in Brazil and much of the rest of the world.

A set of strings weighs roughly 15 to 20 g depending on gauge and pattern. In other words: the same racquet looks about 17 g "heavier" in a US catalog than in a Brazilian listing.

Why it matters in practice

Seventeen grams sounds small, but in tennis it is a whole category. The difference between a 285 g and a 300 g frame (unstrung) is exactly the kind of choice that separates maneuverability from stability — and it is smaller than the gap between the two conventions.

The classic mistake cuts both ways:

1. "This racquet is too heavy for me" — said about the strung figure, compared against a current racquet measured unstrung. The candidate looked 17 g heavier than it plays.
2. "I bought the same racquet as the review" — but comparing a listing's unstrung number against a review's strung number, the buyer took home a frame one category heavier than expected.

Real examples from the catalog, to calibrate your eye:

How to compare without getting burned

There is only one rule: never compare weights without knowing each number's convention. In practice:

• Brazilian store listing, or the number printed on the frame → unstrung.
• English-language catalog, review or comparison → almost always strung.
• When in doubt, subtract ~17 g from the US figure to reach the unstrung convention — or add ~17 g going the other way.
• Always compare within one convention. Which one does not matter; mixing the two is what produces bad decisions.

And remember the published weight describes the frame at factory spec: your choice of string, a dampener and an overgrip add a few more grams to the actual playing weight — one more reason not to treat 5 g differences between listings as decisive.

How RaqMatch displays weight

Our spec catalog comes from a US source, so the source figure is always the strung weight. For visitors browsing in Portuguese we convert to the local unstrung convention — and we are transparent about the method:

• When a Brazilian store publishes that racquet's unstrung weight, we use the store's number, exact.
• When there is no local figure, we derive the unstrung weight by subtracting a typical string job and rounding to the nearest 5 g — the granularity manufacturers actually publish. Derived values are marked with ≈, because the conversion is only good to about ±5 g: a string job does not weigh the same on every frame.
• On racquet pages both conventions appear side by side, each labelled — so the number you see here matches both the local listing and the US review.

The summary

• Brazilian store / Mercado Livre listing → unstrung.
• Printed on the frame → unstrung.
• Tennis Warehouse and English-language reviews → strung.
• RaqMatch in English → strung, the convention the specs were sourced in.

If you are building a shortlist, the full catalog shows every racquet's specs measured on the same ruler — and our quiz filters by weight with the conversion taken into account, so the racquet we recommend is the one you will recognize in the store.