Tennis technically
Given your ability to win a single point in tennis, how likely is it you will win the set? If you want to win 9 out of 10 sets, by what margin do you need to dominate your opponent? It turns out that the answer is 4 out of 7 points. That’s right! You only need…
Did you ever ask what it takes to win 6-0 6-0? You clearly need to dominate your opponent. But by what margin? Out of ten points, how many points do you need to win on average for that result? In an earlier post we established a relationship between the likelihood of winning a point and the…
The last post made several claims about topspin production. In this post, we will explore the physics behind them. Recall the illustrative picture of a tennis great from the last post: We can draw the same arrows in a more abstract manner like this: In order to make things easy, we will always draw that picture…
In an earlier post we discussed the probability of winning a game if you know the probability of winning a point. This is the math behind the formula. The complicated part of the calculation is that a game of tennis can go over deuce many times, even indefinitely (in theory, at least). We will therefore treat…