What's the difference between rank and seed?

Question

How come the seed and rank for tennis players aren't the same what's the difference between the two?

Answer 1

"Ranking" refers to the overall position a player has compared to all other players, based on all tournaments played. Players are awarded points based on matches won, tournaments won, etc.

"Seeding" is a type of ranking used for individual tournaments. It is used to weed out (theoretically) the weaker players early in the tournament so that the stronger players (the higher seeds) will be around to play in the later rounds. (You wouldn't want a Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to play each other in the first round, you'd like to see them in the final.) Depending on the number of players in a tournament, the top seeds sometimes get to skip the first round (this is called getting a "bye"), thus having one less match to play.

Rankings generally are used by tournament directors to determine seeds, but sometimes, they look at a player's past performance on the type of court surface. For example, Pete Sampras in his prime could expect a high seed on grass court tournaments, but a lower seed on clay.

Answer 2

In all tournaments except grandslams the seeding is the ranking of players enterred in the tournament. eg. top four ranked players enterred in a tournament are ranked 1,7,13,14. they will be seeded respectively 1,2,3,4.
However in grandslams the event organisers can use special seeding to give a great unseeded player a seeding (only seen it happen to williams sisters). They can also raise or lower the seeding of certain player to eg. give a grass specialist a higher seeding than a clay-court specialist at Wimbledon.
Hope this helps. please search for similar questions before you ask. I have answered about three similar questions already.