The number we keep coming back to is 95 — as in 95 square inches, the head size on the Yonex VCORE 95 that Felix Auger-Aliassime plays. On a tour where 97 and 100 are the boring, sensible defaults, a 95 is a choice, and it tells you most of what you need to know before we start unpacking the rest of the bag.

The setup, at a glance

  • Frame: Yonex VCORE 95
  • String (mains): Yonex Poly Tour Pro
  • String (crosses): Yonex Poly Tour Pro (full bed, per current public sourcing)
  • Tension: not publicly confirmed in kg/lb
  • Customisation: not publicly detailed
  • Last verified: May 2026
  • Primary source: pro-player gear listing

That's the panel. Everything below is either unpacking those four lines or being honest about what isn't in them.

What the 95 actually measures

A 95-square-inch head is the smallest mainstream frame size still in serious tour rotation. For context: Sinner, Alcaraz, Medvedev, Zverev — all 97 to 100. Djokovic's Head is a pro-stock based on a 95-class mold, but the retail equivalent sits at 97. Federer landed on 97 after years of resistance to going above 90. Auger-Aliassime sitting on a 95 puts him in a small group with players like Stan Wawrinka and Denis Shapovalov, who have historically gravitated to tighter string beds.

What the head size actually controls is the size of the sweet spot and, indirectly, how much the strings move and snap back. Smaller head, smaller sweet spot, less built-in power, more demand on the swing. The trade-off you buy is precision: when you do find the middle, the ball goes where you aimed it, and the frame doesn't add launch you didn't ask for.

Pair that with the VCORE line's 16x19 string pattern — open by historical 95 standards, where 18x20 used to be the assumption — and you get a frame that's been engineered to keep some of the spin window that modern tennis needs without giving up the small-head feel. That combination is the interesting part of FAA's choice. He hasn't gone to a tighter pattern for control; he's gone to a smaller face for it, and kept the spin geometry open.

What the 95 doesn't measure

Head size is the spec everyone quotes, and it's the spec that tells you the least about how a pro frame actually plays. The numbers that matter more — static weight strung, balance point, swingweight, stiffness once customised — aren't in the public listing for FAA's setup, and we're not going to invent them.

What we'd flag, based on what's normal for tour players on Yonex frames: the retail VCORE 95 weighs around 310g unstrung. Pro frames almost always sit heavier once leather grips, lead tape under the bumper, and silicone in the handle are added. Whether FAA's frame is a true retail spec, a matched pro-stock from the Yonex custom shop, or a retail mold with internal customisation, we can't confirm from the available sourcing. The listing names the frame, not the build sheet.

That gap matters for a club reader more than it does for the player. If you walk into a shop and buy a VCORE 95 off the wall, you are buying the geometry FAA plays — same head, same pattern, same beam — but almost certainly not the same swingweight or plow-through. That's the disclaimer that has to sit next to every pro-gear piece, and it sits especially heavily on a 95, where an under-spec frame becomes hard to swing through the ball at recreational pace.

The string: Poly Tour Pro, full bed

The string side is the simpler half of the conversation. FAA's setup, per the most recent public sourcing, is a full bed of Yonex Poly Tour Pro. No hybrid. No gut mains. Same string through mains and crosses.

Poly Tour Pro is Yonex's softer co-poly — closer to a Luxilon ALU Power competitor than to a stiff shaped poly like RPM Blast. It's a round string, not a textured or shaped one, which means spin comes from string-bed snapback rather than from the string biting the ball. In a 16x19 pattern, that snapback is the spin engine: the mains slide on contact and return to position, dragging the ball up off the bed.

Choosing a softer round poly in a 95-head frame is internally consistent. The smaller head already trims power; a stiffer, shaped poly on top of that would risk a string bed that feels boardy on off-centre contact. Poly Tour Pro gives back some of the comfort and pocketing that the small face takes away. The tension number isn't in the public record — pickup-photo tension callouts for FAA aren't something we've been able to verify — so we won't put a kilo figure on it. What we can say is that the choice of string is consistent with a player who wants feel, not free power.

Re-string frequency on tour for a player at this level is typically every match, sometimes every set in humid conditions; we have no FAA-specific stringer interview to cite on cadence.

What this tells you

The setup reads as a player who trusts his swing speed and wants the frame to do less, not more. A 95-inch head with a full bed of co-poly is, on tour in 2026, the configuration of someone who would rather miss long on his own terms than have the frame add a few centimetres he didn't authorise. It pairs with the way FAA plays — big first serve, flat-ish forehand that he hits through rather than rolls, a willingness to take the ball early.

For a club player who admires him and is wondering whether to buy the VCORE 95 off the rack: the honest answer is to demo it before you commit, and to demo it against the VCORE 98 in the same line. The 98 is the same family, two more square inches, and the gap in playability at sub-tour swing speeds is bigger than the spec sheet suggests. A 95 with a full bed of poly is a frame that punishes a tired arm and a late preparation. Pros have neither. Most of us, by the third set of a Saturday match, have both.

What we didn't answer

Plenty. We don't have a verified strung weight, balance, or swingweight for FAA's actual match frame. We don't have a tension number, and without one, any conversation about "stiff" or "soft" string-bed feel is directional, not precise. We don't know whether the handle is leather or replacement-grip-over-stock, whether there's lead at 12 or 3-and-9, or whether the frame is a current-generation VCORE 95 or an older mold under a current paint job — all of which are normal questions for a tour bag and none of which the public sourcing settles.

The places to look next, in order: a clean racquet-bag photo from a 2026 event (the butt cap stencilling usually gives away the mold generation), a stringer-room interview from a tournament Yonex services directly, and any swingweight callout from a customisation shop that's worked on his frames. Until one of those surfaces, the 95 is the number we've got, and it's the number worth thinking about.