Tennis - A game of roulette

Firstly, I was honored and proud of the University of Memphis when I switched on the Open to see fellow Memphians receiving an award on Arthur Ashe for Tennis Facility of the Year. Tied to the same week, happened to be our first Memphis Tennis Reunion. As Tiger’s flew in from around the World, I put down my Honey Deuce and hopped on a red-eye from New York for the weekend to reunite for a not-so-sober, but incredible weekend with teammates and coaches. The thing about being a retiree, especially with an early exit like mine, is that you end up hearing the same few questions over and over from familiar faces. Some of my favorites include:

“Do you regret retiring so early?”

“How come you retired at 23 at 500 in the World?”

“Do you think if you kept going you could have made it?”

These are questions you get when one day you decide to hang up the rackets and pursue an alternative career. I can safely say after five years out the competitive game I’ve got my responses down. While I plan on expanding a bit on my own experiences on tour in the future, I wanted to shed some light on what your odds of success truly are. After reading this, you may start to think I have a gambling problem. To confirm, I do not. But my odds at the tables won’t seem so bad after reading the following…

Statistics Baseball Tennis

As a singles player, you may play say 25-30 tournaments a year, without a true off-season, unless you count the 3 weeks off in December. That’s approximately 50-100 singles matches per year if you’re averaging 1.5 to 4 singles matches per event, more if you include doubles. That’s 2 to 3 days every week, you have to be 100% locked in mentally as well as physically, to give yourself the best chance of winning that day. So what are your odds of winning? Most tennis matches are decided by a point distribution between 3-6%, typically (but not always) in favor of the victor. That means you have anywhere from a 47-53% chance of winning more points when you step onto court. That’s the same odds as rolling red or black on a Russian Roulette table (approx. 47% chance).

If you’ve seen Moneyball, you’ll know that Baseball is a game of statistics and in Baseball you need runs to win you games, and to get runs you need to get on base, as Brad tells us so wisely over and over again.

“Getting on base,” is Baseball’s equivalent of “holding serve” in tennis, which is why it’s such an important aspect of the game. By holding your service games it gives you the opportunity to try and break your opponents serve in an effort to lead the set by what we call a “break of serve.” BUT, the challenge in tennis, unlike Baseball, is you could dominate multiple major variables and still lose a match. A player can average better stats on their serve, hold more service games over the course of the match win more points overall but still lose the match. Every position, every shot, every serve, return and even the conditions change on a second by second basis. There is no static variable, and there’s no time to compute potential outcomes during a point. For example, if a player loses 6-1, 6-7, 6-7, they’ve won 3 more games than their opponent, broken serve more times, and won more points. But they’ve come out a loser on the day.

Overall, you get the idea. Tennis, unlike sports where you have control of a static variable (golf, darts, baseball etc.), is immensely challenging once the level between competitors narrows. So why is it, that you see such dominance in the sport, with such a small variance? Players will win back to back events, winning just a few percent more points than their opponent for 10+ matches in a row. That’s theoretically the equivalent of rolling red on a Roulette table 10 times in a row with a 0.07% probability of success. So how do some players maintain this over an entire career?

The difference

The longer you spend away from the game, the greater your appreciation for the mental component. You ask yourself: why do some players have “IT” and some player’s do not? You spend hours trying to replicate the same feelings and emotions in an effort to find your peak performance, while for some players it’s so consistent.

Study: A UC Santa Barbara study found that overloading the brain's prefrontal cortex, responsible for conscious thought, often hinders athletes' ability to perform instinctively. When participants were asked to recall visual information, they performed better when they weren’t actively thinking about the task​.

So for the purpose of this article, let’s think of tennis players in two cohorts: Thinkers and Non-thinkers.

After spending time in the trenches for so long you learn that tennis favors the “non-thinkers,” or tennis robots as the players call them. These are players who can perform exceptionally, or as rationally as possible in pressure situations. In some cases, they also have the ability to raise their standard under extreme pressure. Meanwhile, their error count in pressure moments stays low, therefore their odds of victory increases even if maintain a similar/slightly lower average across other variables than their opponent. It’s also the same player cohort that has an unwavering ability to recover from losses to improve more consistently than most. Their resilience and mental fortitude is absolute.

However, as a tennis player you know what you sign-up for and you simply get on with it, good odds or no odds, you got for it, hopefully because you’re fulfilling a childhood dream before qualifying as an astronaut. You take your skillset you’ve acquired over the years and apply it best you can (to quote Liam Neeson from Taken). Nonetheless, one thing is guaranteed, that being too analytical in tennis, is a prevailing flaw that will affect your results. The game is not forgiving enough to assume that “if I work x hours harder, I’ll obtain y.” There’s no promises, no guarantees and no x equals y.

The reality is, belief is real and your results are the only way to quantify its value.