The Tennis 128 will return tomorrow with player #89.
* * *
I introduced the Match Charting Project to the world in November 2013. I had no idea whether it would ever draw the interest of anyone outside of a tiny group of tennis-obsessed friends. I was okay with that. The project was designed to be valuable even if we only ended up charting a few matches.
Eight and a half years later, that group of tennis obsessives has grown. Over 140 of you have learned my detailed charting notation and worked through an entire match. A dozen of you have logged every shot of 100 matches or more. One indefatigable contributor, Edo, is now over 1,300 matches. Another super-charter, Zindaras, is also closing in on four digits.
Yesterday, another all-star contributor, Ludo, sent in charts of two John Isner matches. They were the 9,999th and 10,000th charts for the project. We’ve logged six million shots, over one and a half million points, and yes, ten thousand matches. The 10,001st chart appeared in my inbox as I was writing this post.
* * *
Ten thousand matches is hardly a complete record of professional tennis, but it gives us a remarkably detailed view of both the men’s and women’s game.
In the last few years, we’ve come close to finishing many ongoing sub-projects. We have a chart for every grand slam final back to 1980, and many from the 1970s. We have most grand slam semi-finals back to the mid-1980s. We have nearly every Masters 1000 final back to 1990, when the Masters series began, and we have most Masters semi-finals in that span as well.
We’ve charted every match between members of the Big Four. We have almost every tour-level final ever played by the Big Four. We’ve collected charts of the major WTA events back to the 1990s, and we’ve racked up dozens of Evert-Navratilova matches before that. More recently, we’ve charted every single tour-level final (and a fair number of challengers and ITFs) from the last several years.
We have a shot-by-shot log of nearly every point Simona Halep has played back to the birth of the project, and near-complete sets of Aryna Sabalenka and Bianca Andreescu matches. We have charts of 543 Roger Federer matches, and over 400 each for Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. We’ve charted at least ten matches for most players who have reached the men’s or women’s top 50 in recent memory. We have one hundred matches or more for 34 different players, and we’ll add Iga Swiatek and Diego Schwartzman to that list any day now.
You can always check in on the state of the project, along with a full list of charted matches, here. Raw data from more than half of the charts is available for research purposes and updated monthly, here.
* * *
The best part about this project, to me, is that there is value in every single contribution. It may feel like a drop in the ocean to submit, say, the 544th Federer chart, but even that gives us a fuller historical record of Fed’s career and a more detailed statistical summary of his performance that season–not to mention more data on his opponent. If you’re more interested in breaking new ground, there are always interesting young players who are barely represented in the dataset.
Most of all, it’s fun–at least for the right kind of person. Maybe you think it’s bonkers that some of us enjoy typing alphanumerical codes into a spreadsheet as we watch tennis. Put it that way and … well, I get it. But once you get the hang of charting, it forces you pay more attention and learn more about this endlessly complex sport. While watching tennis. Which I suspect you enjoy quite a bit.
Learn how to get started here. I hope you’ll contribute as we march on to the next 10,000 matches.