Eugenie Bouchard qualifies for year-end championships in Singapore

It was tennis's equivalent of sitting in a baseball clubhouse, the magic number at one and waiting to clinch a playoff berth, and watching as a rival team loses.

The celebration might not quite be the same as winning a match and making it through the front door, but after rival Angelique Kerber lost to Svetlana Kuznetsova in Beijing Thursday, Canadian Genie Bouchard officially qualified for the WTA Tour's big year-end championships extravaganza in Singapore.

She is the first Canadian in 25 years to achieve it, since Helen Kelesi in 1989.

How long ago was that? Back then, the top 16 players qualified, it was played in New York at legendary Madison Square Garden, Steffi Graf defeated Martina Navratilova in a best-of-five set final and it was sponsored by a cigarette brand, Virginia Slims.

These days, it's reserved only for the top eight performers during the 2014 season, the best-of-five format is long relegated to the history books and it will be played in Asia for the first time.

Perhaps that promotional junket to Singapore right after the Australian Open in January to whip up interest in the event, heavily criticized at the time for being both presumptious and premature with Bouchard having just jumped into the top 20 with her semi-final effort Down Under, was an omen in the end.

Bouchard joined Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Simona Halep and Petra Kvitova among those safely into the event. Caroline Wozniacki, Ana Ivanovic and Agnieszka Radwanska also squeezed in the back door on Thursday after the losses by Kerber and Ekaterina Makarova, who still had an outside chance. Among them, only Ivanovic is still alive in Beijing.

That's a very good group and, with the retirement of Li Na last week, probably the best-case scenario in terms of marquee attractions even if it doesn't feature a player from Asia.

Four of the final eight are or have been ranked No. 1 (Williams, Sharapova, Ivanovic, Wozniacki). Kvitova is a two-time Wimbledon champion. Halep and Bouchard, the youngest of the group, reached their first Grand Slam finals this season and are qualifying for the first time.

The Tour Finals, after three good years in Istanbul, are moving to Singapore in the first year of a five-year commitment and the WTA Tour, for which the event generates close to half its annual revenue, is planning a very ambition expansion of the tournament. From a five-day event that involved only the top eight women and top four doubles teams, it will be a veritable women's tennis festival that will last 10 days.

First, the doubles event was doubled, to eight teams from four.

Next, the WTA has been running an annoying, timeline-clogging social media campaign that involves lower-tier players begging their Twitter followers to vote them into a new "Rising Stars" component. Mercifully, it ends Friday night when two players from the world and two from the Asia-Pacific region (they won't actually be from host Singapore, but hey, close enough) will be added to the event in a four-player invitational tournament.

The players must be under 23, but the criteria for the Asia-Pacific players (top 150) are a fair bit lower than for the "world" players (top 50). That means nominations for the likes of Nicha Lertpitaksinchai and Luksika Kumkhum of Thailand and Sachie Ishizu of Japan.

There also will be a legends component involving the likes of Navratilova and Chris Evert, who joined Bouchard on that January junket.

The extravaganza will run Oct. 17 to 26.

Bouchard still has two tournament commitments remaining before then in Europe – in Linz, Austria next week and Luxembourg the week after that. Now that she has qualified officially, we'll see if the Canadian plays both those tournaments, which surely were included in her schedule to give her every opportunity to qualify for Singapore. With the field of eight now complete, there are no spots left to fight for; tournament directors might consider switching off their mobile phones to avoid any bad news.

On the positive side for the Linz event, Bouchard wasted little time leaving China and heading to Austria. She's already there.

She even got gifts: