Archive for January 30th, 2010
Predicting service games
Hi! You probably know me from a variety of names, but if you do or you don’t, I’m “Arjun” (at least in this form), and this is a place for me to throw various rantings, research pieces, and other miscellaneous items. If you aren’t interested in analyzing things, well I’ll probably have ranty-pieces as well.
I’m a huge sports fan, so a lot of this will be about sports and baseball especially (because baseball is quantifiable and very prone to statistical thinking). I’ve published lots of stuff in varied places all over the internet, but at least here I can put what I want. There really won’t be a rhyme or reason to what’s exactly on here, but that’s on purpose; that’s how I think. Hey, for all I know, there might just be short stories or something here too!
Please comment! I have the little hit-tracker on the side to satisfy my curiosity/overwhelming need for ego-stroking, but if you comment, that makes me feel even better! And that’s what you want…right?
I have a list of sites on the sidebar; mostly baseball stats websites for now, but I’ll probably add more later. Give them a check if you’re interested based on the description: I promise only to link to the very best.
I’ll have a “jump” in all of my articles, just because I think it’s really cool-looking.
Without further rambling, the article! Tennis! Yay!
Anyway, I’ve been watching a fair bit of the Australian Open (by “a fair bit”, I mean “far far too much”) and generally am one of the sorts to enjoy tennis. By implication, this means that I’m also the type to be curious as to what exactly makes tennis players click – how do they do what they do? Specifically, in a recent match between Roger Federer and Nikolay Davydenko (the numbers one and six in the world, respectively. No idea how they met in the quarterfinals; if someone understands the Australian Open seeding, please tell me), it seemed that the primary difference between the players was that whenever Federer got into trouble in his service games, he had an ace (or two, or three, or even just a big serve) to throw out to even out the game, while Davydenko had an unfortunate habit of double-faulting in said situations.
Naturally, a lot of this is just from my eyes (which are, of course, simultaneously the most reliable and unreliable sources of information in the world), but this got me thinking: how well do aces and double faults predict a player holding serve? Naturally, players who have better serves will have more aces and will hold their serve more often (here in America, the player who is immediately associated with this kind of thinking is Andy Roddick), but to what extent is that true? I wanted to investigate further and, since “having a life” is beyond me, I decided to do just that.
So I used a sample size of sixty-three male players. More specifically, I looked at their success over the last year. There are several problems with this dataset: first, I used the totally-arbitrary cut-off of fifteen games played. I have no idea if this cut-off is too small or too high, while second, I used the data from the whole year, so I’m combining surfaces – never a good idea! Oh well, at least it’s a fun exercise. Third, I’m not accounting for player ability. Federer and Rafael Nadal are weighed the same as Lukas Lacko.
All statistics courtesy tennisinsight.com.
Actual data after the “jump”.
