{"id":1729,"date":"2014-12-08T17:09:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T22:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=1729"},"modified":"2014-12-08T17:09:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T22:09:58","slug":"the-almost-neutral-let-cord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/08\/the-almost-neutral-let-cord\/","title":{"rendered":"The Almost Neutral Let Cord"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Once I started charting matches–carefully watching and notating every shot–I thought I noticed a trend after “let” serves. It seemed that players missed far more first serves than usual after a let, and when players landed a post-let first serve, their offering was weaker than usual.<\/p>\n

Now that we have nearly 500 pro matches<\/a> in the Match Charting Project<\/a> database, including at least 200 each from both the ATP and the WTA<\/a>, there’s plenty of data with which to test the hypothesis.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, there’s no such trend. If anything, players–men in particular–are\u00a0more<\/em> likely to make a first serve after a let cord. When they do, they are\u00a0at least as likely to win the point as in non-let points, suggesting that the serve is no weaker than usual.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the ATP numbers. In over 1,100 points in the charting database, the server began with a let. He eventually landed a first serve 62.8% of the time, compared to 62.0% of the time on non-let points. When he made the first serve, he won 73.3% of points that began with a let serve, compared to only 70.6% of first-serve points when there was no let.<\/p>\n

More first serves in, and more success on first serves. The latter finding, with its difference of 2.7 percentage points, is particularly striking.<\/p>\n

Of the trends I had expected to see, only one is borne out by the data. Since a net cord let is only millimeters away from a fault into the net, it seems logical that net faults would be more common immediately after a let than otherwise. That is the case: 15.7% of men’s first serves result in faults into the net, but after a let, \u00a0that figure jumps to 17.0%.<\/p>\n

When we turn to WTA matches with available data, we find that the post-let effect is even stronger. In non-let points, first serves go in at a 62.8% rate. After a first-serve let, players record a 65.3% first-serve percentage.\u00a0Given that first-serve percentages are usually concentrated in a relatively small range, a difference of 2.5 percentage points is quite significant.<\/p>\n

The WTA data tells a different story than the ATP numbers do when we look at the end result of those first serves. On non-let points, WTA players win first-serve points at a 62.8% rate, while after a first-serve let, they win these points at only a 61.8% clip. It may be that some women approach post-let first serves a bit more conservatively, and they pay the price by winning fewer of those points.<\/p>\n

WTA players also appear to miss a few more post-let first serves into the net, though the difference is not as striking as it is for men. On non-let points, net faults make up 16.2% of the total, and after first-serve lets, net faults account for 16.7% of first serves. Of all the numbers presented here, this one is most likely to be no more than random noise.<\/p>\n

It turns out that let serves don’t have much to tell us about the next serve or its outcome–and that’s not much of a surprise. What I didn’t expect was that, after a let serve, professionals are a bit more likely than usual to find success with their next offering.<\/p>\n

If you like watching tennis and think this kind of research is worth reading, please consider lending a hand with the Match Charting Project<\/a>. There’s no other group effort of its kind, and the more matches in the database, the more valuable the analysis.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it Once I started charting matches–carefully watching and notating every shot–I thought I noticed a trend after “let” serves. It seemed that players missed far more first serves than usual after a let, and when players landed a post-let first serve, their offering was weaker than usual. Now that we have nearly … Continue reading The Almost Neutral Let Cord<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-match-charting","category-serve-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}