As we’ve seen, right-handers serve more effectively to the deuce court than to the ad court, and lefties do the opposite. Based on available data, righties win about 64.0% of points to the deuce court against 62.1% to the ad court, while lefties exhibit a bigger difference, winning 59.3% in the deuce court, 62.8% in the ad court.<\/p>\n
(These numbers are different than those I originally published last week. There was a bug in my calculations; while it does not change any overall conclusions, it turns out that the lefty gap is considerably wider than the initial numbers showed.)<\/p>\n
While the differences are minor, they have some strategic implications. My previously-published win probability tables for a single game assume that players are consistent from point to point, regardless of the direction they serve. It would be foolish to generate new tables for each player’s<\/em> tendencies, but it is possible to do the math separately for the populations of righties and lefties.<\/p>\n Implications<\/strong><\/p>\n We start with a paradox. Given a righty server and a lefty server who win equal percentage of service points, the lefty has a better chance of winning a service game. The paradox is compounded by the fact that slightly more points are played in the deuce court, thanks to games ending at 40-15 and (much more rarely) at 15-40.<\/p>\n Two things explain the lefty advantage. First, close games (those that reach 30-30 or deuce) always have equal numbers of deuce and ad points. When the balance between deuce and ad points reaches 50\/50, a 63% lefty server is a bit better than 63% (63.07%, to be exact), while a 63% righty server is a bit worse (62.96%.)<\/p>\n Second, the wider difference in deuce\/ad outcomes for lefties makes it more likely that a lefty will keep himself in a game, fighting off break points and giving himself another chance to string two points together. As we’ll see in a moment, the difference at break point is the most important aspect of this table.<\/p>\n The table below shows win probabilities for right-handed and left-handed servers who win 63% and 70% of service points. (63% is average for 2011 grand slam matches; 70% is a round number for a dominant serving performance.) Each row shows the likelihood of each type of server winning a game from the given point score.<\/p>\n The most dramatic difference is–as expected–on break point at 30-40 or 40-AD. At both the 63% and 70% levels, left-handedness confers a 2% advantage over right-handedness. There is a noticeable advantage at 40-30 (and AD-40) as well, where the lefty has a better chance of finishing the game immediately, but it is only about one-third the effect of 30-40.<\/p>\n Here is the full table for each type of server at each point. I expect that you’ll keep it handy each time you watch a match.<\/p>\n As we’ve seen, right-handers serve more effectively to the deuce court than to the ad court, and lefties do the opposite. Based on available data, righties win about 64.0% of points to the deuce court against 62.1% to the ad court, while lefties exhibit a bigger difference, winning 59.3% in the deuce court, 62.8% in … Continue reading Win Probability Tables for Righties and Lefties<\/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":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","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=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} 63% 63% 70% 70% \nSCORE RH LH RH LH \n0-0 79.42% 79.65% 90.02% 90.26% \n0-15 64.09% 65.36% 78.51% 79.71% \n0-30 43.22% 43.52% 58.69% 58.88% \n0-40 18.21% 19.28% 28.46% 29.97% \n\n15-0 88.05% 88.63% 94.75% 95.15% \n15-15 76.91% 77.22% 87.49% 87.66% \n15-30 57.21% 58.72% 70.95% 72.64% \n15-40 29.45% 29.62% 41.28% 41.55% \n\n30-0 94.83% 94.92% 98.02% 98.04% \n30-15 88.09% 88.81% 94.17% 94.72% \n30-30 74.31% 74.46% 84.53% 84.62% \n30-40 46.04% 48.36% 58.22% 61.04% (40-AD) \n\n40-0 98.66% 98.76% 99.56% 99.62% \n40-15 96.48% 96.55% 98.61% 98.63% \n40-30 90.23% 91.05% 95.17% 95.68% (AD-40) \n40-40 74.31% 74.46% 84.53% 84.62%<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"