Last weekend at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, I gave a talk, “First Service: The Advent of Actionable Tennis Analytics.” The presentation was in three parts:
- The sorry state of tennis data
- Schedule optimization (based in part on this blog post)
- The Match Charting Project (more about that in this post, among others)
The conference video-recorded all presentations, and I understand that video will be posted on the Sloan site. When it becomes available, I’ll post a link here.
In the meantime, many people have asked for my slide deck: First Service.
Also, Jim Pagels wrote a brief piece for Forbes drawing on my talk, which you can read here.
Hi Jeff,
I really liked your presentation!
I’m not sure about your scheduling conclusion though. I believe you have use too simple model for your simulation. A more complex model, using different rankings for each surface, would make some players choose a different tournament than the biggest tournament they can enter, especially when there are weeks of both clay and hard courts tournament.
Regards,
Amir