How Poker can Improve Your Tennis
For years now, tennis coaches, players and commentators have been talking about “percentage plays.” These are plays that offer a safe way to win the point, offering large margin for error. Classic high-percentage plays include cross-court rallies, returning deep to the server’s feet and the wide serve plus one. These plays offer an objective, stats-oriented strategy, and don’t always take into account how subjective tennis really is. Every match is played in different conditions, against unique players. There is no single best strategy.
Looking Deeper
In an interview with ATP Coach Beau Treyz, Stephen asked what statistics are important for Treyz’s player, Brandon Nakashima. Treyz explained that everyone looks at numbers, like 2nd serves or rallies won under 4 shots. Looking at those basic stats just isn’t enough to give you a competitive advantage anymore. You have to look at them just to play the game.
So where do Treyz and Nakashima find a competitive advantage in statistics?
Treyz points to how important breakpoints are. Figuring out how an opponent is going to play important points can reveal effective winning strategies. Much of tennis is individual, meaning player match-ups tell the story of wins and who loses, not objective performance indexes.
Lessons from Poker
A few years ago, I got pretty interested in poker. I’m terrible, but not a total n00b. In the past 20 years, much like tennis, poker has changed dramatically due to technology. Tennis changed because racquets and strings changed, but poker changed because of the Internet. The Internet transformed poker from a game of psychology to a game of statistics. Many of the older players who used intuition, feels and “tells” to win were getting crushed by math nerds playing out of their mom’s basement. Playing poker with “feel” doesn’t offer the same kind of reliability that playing with math offers. Ironically, many of play tennis with “feel,” meaning we aren’t always playing in the most reliable way. So how can we transfer “feel” in to more reliable strategy? “Range,” a crucial concept to modern poker, was explained to me by Poker legend Daniel Negreanu’s Youtube channel.
A player’s range is the number of possible hands a player is likely to have in a given scenario.
Negreanu constructs other player’s ranges through his previous encounters with them. How players bet, how they don’t bet, and what position they play hands from, are all factors that can help you narrow down someone’s range. A range is basically your pattern of play. In poker, you can hide your range by playing more unpredictably, making it harder for your opponent to find the optimal strategy. Negreanu believes that poker today is not about hand vs. hand, but range vs. range. In other words, what are the likely combinations of cards I have, versus the different combos you have. This is very similar to tennis, a game that is all about match-ups. The shots that I am I likely to play on break point will define the shots you should play to counter them. My shots vs. your shots, my plays vs. your plays, my range versus your range.
The Winning Hand
When Treyz and Nakashima are analyzing players’ tendencies in breakpoints, they are constructing that player’s range on break point. Whether they usually play aggressively or conservatively doesn’t matter. What matters is your ability to predict their plays. How likely are they to go big on the first ball? How likely are they to rally up the middle? How likely are they to play a drop shot? If you know your opponent’s most probable play, you can be ready with the winning strategy. This, of course, will vary from player to player, depending on how your strengths compare to your opponent's strengths, but if you can understand and predict their behaviour, you give yourself a chance to crack them.
Tennis is a game of match ups. Big, overarching stats tell the story after the match has happened, but they don’t always reveal the importance of individual points. Individual points guide the story, one step at a time.
Understanding these steps can help you build the opponent’s range and win more matches.
by Beckett Chung, producer and media cowboy @theslicetennis
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