Scott Fawcett: Using math and logic to make better strategic decisions

Hey everyone, welcome to the 61st episode of Baseline Intelligence. With the Masters Tournament coming up this week, I thought it was a good idea to share my conversation with one of the premier golf data analysts in the world, Scott Fawcett from Decade Golf.

A big part of how I see the game of tennis so simply and logically has actually come from him because there are so many parallels between golf and tennis strategies and mindsets. So today, even when the conversation might include a lot of golf vocabulary,

Try to find the tennis equivalent, and I think you'll find how relevant some of these ideas are to your tennis game. So on today's episode, we'll discuss meditation, how to pick the mathematically correct target, and how there's no such thing as aggressive or conservative. just optimal. So sit back, relax, and prepare to become a smarter tennis player. All right, Scott, welcome to the pod.

Thank you very much. This is one of the first ones in a sports genre that's not golf that I've done. I've done a few in poker and other economics and other things, but I think it's interesting to see how we can work our way through this topic. It's interesting because I named the show Baseline Intelligence and I...

This might be stupid for search engines, but I left tennis out of there because I wanted to be able to interview people from other sports and other genres so we can learn. And you're someone, honestly. I've had Hall of Famers, Grand Slam winners, number one in the world. And I was telling my wife, like, I might be more nervous for this interview than anyone because I follow all your stuff online as a golfer.

Your teachings are incredible. So for the tennis listener out there who doesn't play golf, can you just briefly describe kind of who you are and what you do for the golf community?

I think the easiest way to explain it is, you know, like money ball for baseball. I'm kind of the guy that did that for golf. So when the new advanced strokes game statistics started coming out, rather than just saying how many greens in regulation did you hit or how many putts per green regulation, we came up with.

more quantitative statistics. And as a guy who's played professional golf and been in the golf business forever, I just kind of realized that if I know how many strokes it takes to hole out from any given area on the golf course, as a concrete example, it takes one and a half strokes to hole out from eight feet.

knew if i know every inch and every starting condition how many strokes it takes to hole out and then i know the size of shot patterns for the most part because of launch monitors that i could kind of combine those data sets and And air quotes solve course management because it's just always been this mystical, elusive, cliche riddled aspect of golf. And so I did a lot of work from 2013 to 14 on this really just for my own game. And then I had a shoulder, an elbow injury rather, that...

Basically, I wasn't going to be able to play in the Texas Amateur that year. And Will Zalatorris, who some of your listeners may know if they're in golf at all, he was just a junior golfer at my home course here in Dallas. And once I couldn't play in the Texas Am, I just asked him, can I caddy for you next week? And I explained to him, here's everything.

thing that I did and why we're going to do this. And he was really a struggling junior golfer at the time, ranked 3,300 in the world. And I was like, Really, he stripes the ball. He's like, if you just do what I tell you to do, I think you'll win. And he won by four. And then the following month, I went and caddied for him when he won the U.S. Junior. And the SMU coach then asked me, Well, Bryson DeChambeau is an idiot. I can't get him to start playing overly aggressive. Can you come teach him?

what you taught will and so i designed an indoor seminar to uh to go teach that to bryson right before he won the ncaa's and u.s amateur and apparently now i know enough about golf that i'm talking to people about tennis too

Love that. So, you know, golf is probably a little more set up for very specific statistics. And we have them in tennis. For example, when you come to the net, you win about 60, 65% of your points. We always know that when you come to the net, you do better than you do from the baseline.

But some people really reject math as players and coaches. They don't like that. So one thing you did that I loved is you simplified some of the stats and some of the concepts into kind of like five main categories that you called like the Tiger Five. Can you just kind of explain what those are? Yeah, so Tiger, he won in the late 90s, but he wasn't dominant in the late 90s. He won a couple times a year. Obviously, he...

He's known for that 13-shot win from the Masters from 1997. But after that, he really, again, won a couple times a year, but it wasn't like he was. And the golfers, every single round we play, because we're psychopaths, probably like tennis players are also, I think that anyone who gravitates towards it...

individual sport tends to be somewhere on the type a uh personality and maybe tennis players even more because you're also fit whereas golfers can be fat and lazy um tiger you know we finish every round of golf and think we should have shot lower and i think tiger

was having those exact same feelings through the late 90s and so my understanding is he basically started writing down at the end of each round well why do i feel that way which which shot specifically and after doing it for again i don't know if it's a year or more but after doing it for a while he I believe he just sat down and said okay what are the common mistakes and for him he came up with bogeys on par fives double bogeys three putts

blown easy saves, and bogey with wedge or less. Nine iron or less, rather, from inside 150 yards. And it's just crazy because what I try to tell people is, if you feel like you should have shot lower when you've played, which, again, 100% of people do, and it's not one of those five mistakes you're probably kidding yourself i mean and there really is it sounds like a joke but it's like

If you think you should have shot lower every time you play, there's only one of the two things that's possible. You're not as good as you think you are, or you made mental and strategic mistakes. And so what's crazy is we all just go work on the physical aspect of the game, and we just...

leave that strategic and mental piece again we read sports psychology books and whatever but it's not like we really dwell on it and tiger being the goat he really dwelled on it and it's crazy because in the middle of the 99 season You can see this shift overnight. So he was averaging on bogeys inside 150, basically with nine iron or less. He was averaging 2.3 per round through the late 90s, which...

is a huge percentage of your actual opportunities from an inside 150. And literally almost overnight, he went from 2.3 to 1.3. He got a full shot better just by not making bogey inside 150. And I do think that he probably... Just at some point was like, I'm just going to screw around and try to not do that for a tournament. And he won eight of his last nine starts. Again, you can just literally see the data just it stopped overnight because people like to be cynical and be like.

Well, maybe something finally clicked in a swing. Not overnight. That's just not how it works. You don't get that much materially better. That had to be a mental and strategic shift. So it's interesting. I have a friend, his name's Sig Mydal. He works, he's the assistant GM for the Orioles. He's basically you in baseball. He's one of the original baseball money ball guys. And I was telling him how silly I think people are when they don't follow stats.

I'm like, if you have information out there, why would you not do it? And he said, well, let me give you an example. He said, if you were winning 20% of your second serve points, how you normally serve, and I asked you to hit two first serves.

And that meant based on the numbers, how often you made it in your win percentage on a first serve, you would win one more point per hundred. Would you do it? And I was like, well, I don't know. Like, that seems a little weird. He's like, okay, well then you're, you're full of crap. Because one point out of 100 is massive and you're rejecting it just because it's a new idea to you. It's a little outside the box. Yeah.

exactly so he kind of called me out on that but you know the double faults the missed returns and then on ground strokes just missing balls in the net and wide just giving away free points and one of my favorite videos that I saw from you

you were mentioning a golfer who had made a few bogeys, was behind and around, and he kind of was telling his coach, hey, don't worry, I'm going to get a few of these shots back. And the coach was kind of like, how about you just stop giving away so many? Let's just start with that. And I think that's a very good place to start for tennis.

That was a Facebook post. It really was amazing. The guy turned it like three over, and he's got like a 72 scoring average, and he did. He yelled to the coach across the green, like, don't worry, I'm going to do a few back. But this is what I try to tell people. Just to make math easy, if you've got a 76 scoring average...

or 72 scoring average, so 36 on each side, and you turn at 39, your expected score is no longer 72. You're three over that. Let's don't turn that 75 into a 77. I mean, that's really...

I mean, it's why the college teams that I work with have just been crushing the national championships lately. Because once you get this idea... through your head and again with five players playing almost by definition someone's gonna play bad that day we can't have two people play bad that day and we certainly can't have two people

I hate using the word quit because it's kind of an aggressive, derogatory word. But if you start trying to play more aggressively because you're down or you change that second serve strategy, whatever it was, or you're like, I really need a winner here.

You try to just buzz the net a little bit more. You've abandoned strategy. You've abandoned proper strategy, which I do believe is a form of quitting. And again, that gets back to like when you start getting mad again. I played competitive tennis through about seventh grade.

a racket slammer i was a hothead on the golf course too it's funny actually working with a new therapist now and she's like when's the first time you remember really getting mad i was like well golf i've always been a hothead and i was like Damn it. I was in tennis too. Like I just, I don't accept not doing things perfectly very well. Um, and it is just interesting. Once you start getting mad.

That's quitting. You have now quit your mental strategy because you don't start off a game. I'm going to be as mad as possible out here, and that's definitely how I'm going to play optimal. I mean, I'm sure there are great tennis players, McEnroe or whoever the modern equivalent that is. But I don't believe those people let it impact their downstream play. Tiger got as mad as anyone, but then he truly left it behind once it was time to get to the next shot.

And that's, again, it's a really difficult thing to do well. So I suggest trying to work on meditation and other things to avoid getting mad in the first place or not get avoid, but recognize it before it spirals out of control.

But any of those are forms of quitting, in my opinion, and that's what the kid was basically doing, yelling to his coach, I'm about to quit on you because I'm about to go make a double from trying to force something when clearly I don't have my A game today. Like, just tap the brakes, man.

When you got into, you know, if you always leave the course or the tennis court feeling like you didn't play well, there's probably an expectation misalignment there. You don't know what you're supposed to be doing. So in tennis, for example. I chart all my players' matches when I go on the road with them. It's very rare they're going to be below 30% of the points where they've missed.

I know going in, one out of every three points, they're going to miss. That's just normal. Whether it's their fault or their opponent hit a good shot, it doesn't really matter. That is, for me, a total expectation. And so if a player comes out and misses on two of the first six points...

They're already looking around going like, what's up with my forehand today? I'm like, nothing. This is totally standard. So how do you help people? We have information out there, and yet I feel like a lot of people still get emotional and frustrated. How do you help them kind of digest?

those expectations. Well, again, I talk a lot about meditation and the decade app, and I do believe as much as I hate social media, the one thing I think is great about social media is you're getting more candid.

podcast and interviews with the all-time greats and whether it's a specific meditation practice where you're just sitting down for 10 minutes or whatever it is or they've just got a pre-game ritual because that is just a moving meditation i mean if you've got the same ritual earbuds in and you listen to the same music over and over again. That's your version of it. But I do think that an explicit meditation routine is vital. And I think the one thing that's interesting about it, especially.

Golf, you're trying to be chill. Tennis, you certainly need to be up in energy, but you can be up in energy and slower in thought. And the thing that I got wrong whenever I was in my 20s playing professional golf was... I thought that meditation was about having no thoughts. And if you were thinking, then you were failing at it.

And now as I've gotten much better and more educated in it, it's not about having no thoughts. It's about recognizing the ruminating and recurring thought pattern. So to your point exactly right there, I missed two out of the first six points. oh shit here we go again like this is gonna be a terrible day it's like is that thought helpful first of all probably not and you know a we can use some data to analyze is it accurate to help the downward spiral

But more than anything, it's about just recognizing that thought's not helpful. Just kind of laugh at it. And again, I used to hate the cliche that sports psychologists say, just imagine yourself taking that thought and placing it on a raft and watching it float down the river. But at the end of the day...

That's correct. And so Sam Harris, who has the Waking Up app, which I have all of my players use, literally, I've been doing this for a long time, and it finally just clicked with me, honestly, just like a month ago. One of his meditations that he always has is he'll just be like, listen for sounds. And so like right now, my air conditioner just kicked on. I didn't know that sound was about to come. It did. I heard it.

But then also, I didn't keep thinking about it. And so what he's trying to do is get you to recognize sounds just pop in and out of your head. And this is where it gets a little esoteric, but...

Thoughts just pop in and out of your head too. It's a very extreme idea of it is you're not the thinker of your thoughts. You're really not. As much as we want to have ownership and everything, you didn't think whatever you just thought. It did just pop in your head. Now you can... actively try to think something, I get it, but the negative thing?

You most likely didn't intend to think that. And so being able to recognize that thought was just like a sound, I do have the ability to just let it go. Now, again, it takes a lot of practice. And I think that's why most people don't.

carry forward with meditation is they don't see any results for a month, three months, maybe even a year. But eventually it starts clicking and you'll finally figure out like one day it'll click where you'll have something that happened that normally would have pissed you off. And it just won't. Or you'll recognize, does getting mad help me in this situation? That answer is almost always no. I mean, if we're in a fight or flight situation with a bear chasing you, like...

Maybe being mad would help because you get a little more adrenaline. But aside from that, getting mad is literally useless. And what meditation allows you to do almost is just decide how long you want to stay mad for. Unless you're actively thinking about why you're mad, it's literally impossible to stay mad for more than a couple seconds. So you have to keep on focusing on that ruminating thought pattern. And that's what it is you're trying to just recognize. It's still going to happen.

You're just recognizing that it's happening. I mean, Sam's got a great quote where he says, if someone walked in the front door of your house and just followed you around narrating what you're saying to yourself, it's literally nothing different. It is nothing different than you just talking to yourself constantly. You would kill them by noon. I mean, you would just be like you're the meanest asshole.

that I've ever heard. Stop saying that. But it's what we we're all just hopelessly lost in thought. And the goal is to stop being hopelessly lost in thought. And again, I don't care what sport it is that's happening to you.

Yeah, you mentioned Sam Harris. And like I said, I'm going to call you back to videos you made like four years ago, because that's when I started following all your stuff. But there was a great one that you have in your course. And it was about how problems are basically guaranteed to pop up.

It's part of your life. It's part of tennis. Like I can say we don't want to miss returns. People are going to miss 15, 20% of their returns. Like that's just kind of a guaranteed thing. Those problems are going to pop up. Can you kind of elaborate on how you see that and what that video kind of meant?

Yeah, so Sam, in this basically verbal essay in this podcast, he says that he's had something that seemed like a tragedy to him going on, like a big problem. And he was having lunch with a friend, and he was just like...

This doesn't seem like that big of a problem. You can deal with this. Did you actually expect to not have any problems today? Do you actually not want to have any problems? As crazy as that idea sounds, his analogy is, would you want to play a video game where you get to the 20th?

level and then literally nothing happens you just like a super mario brothers where you just run straight across the screen for 30 seconds and then that's the end of the level like problems are what adds especially in sports what adds greatness to the games And so like, again, to myself personally in golf, I used to treat every bad shot and every just negative occurrence is like an anomaly. Like, oh my God, I hit a bad shot today.

If you know something's going to happen, you know you're going to miss 15% to 20% of your strokes or whatever it was. can you get mad when it happens like it's it's literally the definition of either dumb or insane if you're actually going to get mad when you know something that's going to happen happens and dustin johnson

You know, DJ gets a lot of grief in golf for kind of being a little bit on the dumber side of things. But if you actually listen to what he says a lot of the time, it's truly savant level. Frank Nabilo had him in the booth back during the British Open five or eight years ago. And he said, man, you just seem pretty chill out there. Like...

What's going on? How are you so relaxed? He's like, look, man, I hit good shots every day. Am I really going to get that excited about him? I hit bad shots every day. Am I really going to get that mad about him? And I'm like...

And everyone literally, because he's just like, I mean, I hit good shots every day. Like, he sounds kind of dumb. And everyone just is making fun of how he sounds. And I'm like, it's literally one of the most brilliant statements possible. Now, most people just aren't wired that way. Like, I'm not wired that way. But...

I'll be objective. Maybe it's through I'm 50, a little bit less testosterone. I'm not worried about money like I used to, and I just don't care about my score as much as I used to. But I don't get mad on the course anymore. I did just play in Champions Tour Q School two weeks ago.

And because of injuries and because of just not being able to play much, I was totally unprepared for it because I just didn't have the time or physical body to do it. And yet I still went out there. And because I didn't get mad, I kept my Tiger 5 mistakes to... My goal was to have three or four a day, so 12 or 14 for the tournament. I kept them to nine only.

which again I basically just know there's like don't hit the ball in the net don't hit it wide keep it in the middle of the court let them make the mistake and see what happens and i finished 21st with them taking 18 and two alternates and again i literally played golf nine times from july until two weeks ago

and was competitive with some of the best 50-year-olds on the planet. And I do believe I accomplished that by being fitter than everyone else in the field. So I hit the ball a little bit further. I didn't get tired at all. I mean, yes, I've got some injuries, but... I'm in better shape than them, which I would have to believe is one of the grueling parts of tennis.

I don't want to go run the lines. Well, go do it until you can't do it anymore. I literally just saw a Nick Saban thing recently where he was just like, we're going to be in better shape than everyone, period. When they're getting tired. We're just going to take over in the fourth quarter. And that's just how they do it. Even when they're getting beat, he's like, don't mail it in on me and make us down 14 in the fourth. Let's be down 10 going into the fourth and we will kick their ass then.

The longer you can make a tennis match, I've got to believe is the better. For sure. I mean, anything that you can control like that, there's no reason to not be great at it. And kind of one thing I always tell my players is, so I'm a scratch. And I take pride in the fact that I'm the ugliest scratch. Like, if you watched me, you would not think I'm a scratch. But I take that as a badge of honor because I'm going, I do everything else probably better than a scratch.

But my physical game is maybe like a two or a three. And in tennis, we have a thing called a UTR, a universal tennis rating. It's basically a handicap. And I'm like, I want you to hit the ball like an eight UTR and think like a 12. And so your level is actually a nine. and people are thoroughly confused how the algorithm could have messed up like this person's not a nine you want to squeeze everything out of what you got and a lot of that comes between the ears which people hate working on

I mean, 100%. And that's, you know, we were talking before we started, one of the books that is just mandatory reading for a player when I start working with them is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. And it's kind of a test, too, because... I don't like wasting my time with people who aren't going to do what I ask them to do. And so I'm like,

Here's the book. You have two weeks to read it. I hate reading. Listen to the audiobook. I don't care what you do, but you've got two weeks to do it. And if I call you, I don't tell them this, but if I call you in two weeks and you haven't done it, We're done. Like I give you one piece of homework that was going to require about six or seven hours. You couldn't find the time for it. I don't believe you're going to find the time for everything else. And again, that gets back to the idea of let's.

do those small things to where, like you say, There's zero chance if anyone watched me play last week, they would have thought I missed by one spot. It was so gross, it was unbelievable. I mean, I drove it fairly well, I chipped it fairly well, but everything else was literally awful.

They would have shot, I mean, I even am kind of dumbfounded, to be perfectly honest. I'm like, I don't understand how I was remotely competitive in this arena. But it's mainly because my mental scorecard, so the mental scorecard we track.

And I do think this is really interesting. God, I really do just ramble. You asked me one question. I will take it a million. I love it. You give it all. I'll figure out how to edit it all. The mental scorecard is Dr. Michael Larden, who works with David Duvall and Will Zalatouris and Phil Nicholson.

and some, he came up with this deal where it's basically, before every shot, did you have a clear picture of exactly what you're trying to do? How far were you trying to carry it? What shape were you trying to hit it? And what was your directional target? And then... when you pulled the trigger were you 100 present fully committed the goal on that stat is to have it over 95 mine was at 97 for the four rounds at

Champions Tour Q School two weeks ago. But what's interesting about this, and I actually spoke at MIT's Sports Analytics Conference two years ago, and this was the topic. I was like, Well, my math is just weighted average, pretty basic math. That's really not going to impress MIT. What can I talk about that's different? And the fact that golf is the only sport field goal kicking is kind of similar.

but you don't have as many attempts. Golf, you can say after every single shot, did I check all those boxes? You can't do it in tennis because you can't just run over after every single, I mean, let alone serve after every single shot. But so we need to try to take this information and just assume the mental part of it smooths over to other sports, which I just have no, I can't imagine why it wouldn't.

And so if you take a golfer who, again, I had Will Zalatouris, Maverick McNeely, a couple of pretty smart PGA Tour players track this for a season. And so I trust them. It's hard to be completely unbiased if you miss a five-foot putt. or something, you want to say, I wasn't quite committed there or something. But so if I take mine, Wills, Mavericks, a couple other players, and we compare relative to par.

what they were on holes with 100% positive mental scorecard versus relative to pars on a hole with a negative mental scorecard event, the difference is about a quarter to a third of a shot. Obviously, if you aren't thinking, it's not like you're going to for sure lose an entire shot. Sometimes you accidentally hit a great shot. But it's obviously not nothing. So even just intuitively a quarter-ish to a third-ish makes sense.

Well, like Maverick, Will, myself, everybody when they start tracking this stat, they're usually in the 87 to 90% range. And so let's just do easy math. Let's say you're at 90% and the goal is to get to 95%. That is now a scoring average of 70, which would mean that would be seven shots.

from 90 percent if we can get that to 95 that's three and a half more shots around that we are thinking about better at a quarter to a third of a shot literally it's basically a full shot of improvement just by thinking better And I literally have no reason why the math wouldn't hold, whatever the appropriate statistic would be. But being a full shot better with a scoring average of 70 is...

an improvement that is out of this world off the charts. And I just, again, that's getting back to meditation. In golf, I do believe you have to sit down away from the game and think about strategy. You have to think about your mindset. It feels like if I'm out there working.

on my putting, I feel like I'm actively getting better. You technically might be getting worse if you're not working on the right thing, or if you're doing it brain dead and not paying attention. I would think that's similar to working on your serve, but you're not really there and paying attention.

There's all kinds of studies about block versus random practice, and they always show that randomizing your practice, so changing targets, changing clubs every single time is better than just hitting the same shot with the same club. And I'm like, how did you control out the fact that you're just paying? more attention.

Because you can't. There's no way you can control that out from either group. I do know from experience you can pay full attention while hitting the same shot over and over again. And then we're able to, it would be like in tennis, like randomizing your practice by hitting some serve. from the forward line some serves from six feet behind the line well because that's giving me better court awareness and better ability with my racket like but you're never gonna do that so

What's the point? I mean, three-pointers, we want to shoot those from all kinds of different places, but your serve, I'm probably going to be standing basically right here and probably going to be hitting it basically into the same court. I just really believe that you've got to slow down in practice.

Because what we're trying to do is work on that mental scorecard, because that definitely has a direct impact on how good you are. The mental scorecard is this is why I love learning from I mean, I'm interested in golf, but learning from anything because.

While you can't go through every shot and go, oh, was I fully committed? Did I accelerate with confidence and go to my target? That's too much to think about. But you can keep track and go before the point that I planned where my serve was going, where I wanted to hit my first ball.

Maybe a basic tactic. Was I wanting to serve in Bali? And then afterwards, you can go, did I do it with some level of commitment or not? I mean, of course, if you ended up hitting eight shots, there's a chance one of those in the point was less than perfect. you don't need to like whatever, but you can still go through. There's so often I'll ask a player like, Hey, what was your goal there? And they're like, I was serving at the box. Like, that's not a, that's not a.

Tactic. That's just starting a point. You know, there's no thought. So even something like that. Yeah. I asked the guy when I coached at Duke, I asked a player what his favorite serve was. And he said, deuce box. And I go, that's not.

that's not a serve dude. You can serve wide. You can serve body. You can serve flat. You can serve with topspin. That's not, I guess like, this is awesome. Cause you have no clue what you're doing and you're already good. Like, this is great for us. Like you're going to make a big jump. which is huge. But that metal scorecard, I think, probably can apply to any sport. It's just you got to tweak it a touch since you can't obviously just be in control of that singular shot.

Well, and again, I do think that you can also rest assured the math is very solid on how important it is in golf and just rely on that. I have thought of different ways that a player could do it. Like if you just had four pennies in your pocket.

And if you recognized after a point, I didn't really know what I was doing there, just take one penny, move it to the other pocket. Again, hopefully you don't have more than four in a single game, and then you just kind of keep resetting at each game, and then you figure out how many total points you had.

I do think you could back into the math somehow. I don't know that it's necessary to try to recreate the entire process. Again, you can just lean on the math that we did on it. But I just, again... Those are the mistakes that I believe you work on in the meditation. I had a player last year that won for the first time on the PGA Tour. And I was just like, how was it out there, man? Were you freaking out? I'm always just concerned. I know. I think it was one of my...

deficiencies as a player was I would probably overthink and freak out. And he said that the sports psychiatrist he had been working on. that they had been doing these deals for a while where they would do a 10-minute meditation and then a 10-minute tape they had made of, okay, I'm in the middle of the 70-second hole. Like, literally put yourself in this situation. Well, again, it's like we were talking about before we started.

And Djokovic, this is back, I think it was the 2013 French finals against Nadal. Because it was one of those ones, it was like game, like the fifth set was like eight to six. So you go back and you can figure out which one this is I'm talking about. But you could see that Djokovic was down, love 40. with Nadal serving. And yeah, I'm sure he's losing that game probably 95% of the time.

But there's a 5% chance. Again, I would actually, that'd be interesting math to know. Do you know what that would be? I think that I don't know the exact percentage, but it's, it's something that high, especially if you're, you've got a guy that, that good.

But you could just tell because he just hit such a bad return. You could just tell he wasn't there. He'd already just given up, which again, I bet you that was one that he... recognized after the fact if he does which i guarantee you he does self-reflection he's just like just i wasn't there at all on that now again he probably didn't matter buddy but you know you would have had a better chance if he was

fully there in focus. And it's interesting to just watch the evolution of a player. I don't think the two year ago Djokovic would have had the same mistake. One last thing I want to talk about with you. It's more of a tactical thing and it's something that you opened up my eyes to with golf and it 1000% applies to tennis. Before I get into how I've used it with my coaching, can you briefly describe what a shot pattern is in golf?

Sure. I mean, so if you think about like a shotgun, even though I'm from Texas, I should probably know how many BBs are a shotgun shell, but I don't. But if you have a shotgun and you fire it from 20 feet, it's going to create... a shot pattern so if you could have a piece of paper that they all perfectly go through well in golf if you hit you know a thousand shots

I know where you're aiming, but obviously you're not going to hit it there every single time. So you establish your shot pattern by hitting 50 to 100 shots with each club. And now we know the width and the depth of what I can expect from a seven iron or a driver or whatever the club is. And critically to this, and again, this I would think is perfectly analogous to tennis. If you've got a shot pattern, I don't have a clue how wide it would be, but let's say Nadal.

running across the baseline is trying to take it up the right sideline. He's got a shot pattern five or eight feet wide, whatever that number is.

the times he hits the the line exactly he probably missed his target three feet right now that's really convenient because he's probably going to win that shot but that's not what he was trying to do the time they hit the tape obviously and it bounces over the flag the net that is not they were trying to do it's a really convenient outcome i happen to miss my actual target of two feet above the net a low and it just stopped dead on the other side so now the key to that is is

in golf i know exactly directionally and distance wise i know which shotgun bb i want to come out but i have to kind of allow for not all of the shot pattern because I better miss some otherwise I'm playing too conservatively. I better miss wide some or I'm playing too conservatively. So I know which one of those pellets I want to come out, but I literally have zero clue which one is going to come out. And so now once we've allowed for about 80-85% of them in golf, because again...

In tennis, missing it is far worse because you just literally lost the point. In golf, I still have a chance to save par or whatever. And this is the crazy thing. Shot patterns are massive compared to what people think. If there's any one thing I've brought to golf that I think people are like, oh, you've got to be kidding me, is that shot patterns on the PGA Tour with driver with no wind and no conditions are 70 plus yards wide.

If you throw any wind in there, it's 100 yards wide, and literally nobody believes that. I mean, I've got a general idea of where it's going, but it's a football field across from only three football fields away how big this thing could be.

Again, I would bet most people, especially depending on their ATR rating, whatever that rating was, shot patterns are way bigger. I would expect that most skill levels, unless you're not aiming... damn near close to the middle of the court you're probably kidding yourself and then you're just letting amazingly enough the variance of your shot pattern create the winners and then you're hoping for the vast majority of time that your opponent hits the loser i mean

There's so many parallels. I'll ask someone, hey, how accurate do you think Djokovic can be? And they're like, I don't know. He can probably hit it within two feet. And I'm like, okay, well, let's watch a five-set match. He hit in the alley 25 times. Do you think he was...

purposely trying to lose a point there? No. So we know he missed his target by at least a couple feet. He bangs it in the net. By the way, there's a ton of points where he'll hit the ball in the service line. Super short, which is not great in tennis. That means the other person can attack, come in. Was that really his intention to hit it 18 feet short of the baseline? Let me tease it up for you. Yeah.

Yeah, so it's like, you know he can't do that, and now you're a 3-5, 4-0 player, which is the equivalent of a 10 or a 15 handicap, and you go, somehow you have the expectation that... you're actually going to hit it where you aim there's there's no chance this is probably a perfect analogy too is like the thrill of hitting that screaming winner that just goes past your opponent where you're just like i'm good

is so satisfying, I imagine. And that's where people talk about in golf, like, you know, I'm just here, like, I like hitting the hero shot every once in a while. And the thing about it is, is... you're going to accidentally hit that shot. You don't have to tell anyone that that's not what you're trying to do. Looking back at my career in my 20s, I actually hated playing with the caddy in the corn fair events. I played in the 99 U.S. Open.

And I didn't realize until Creating Decade, the reason I hated having caddies was imposter syndrome. I hated having to talk about with someone else, here's what I'm going to do. Because I knew in my gut, I'm not going to do it. And I literally, in reverse engineering it, it was total imposter syndrome fear of, I don't want this guy that caddies on tour and I just happen to pick him up for the week. Be like, what are you doing? You're wasting your time.

I mean, Tiger, to your point, like with the wide shot from Djokovic... Tiger on number 17 at TPC Sawgrass in the 11 or 12 years that shot length, which is where they laser measure where every single shot was. In one of the final rounds, he hit one of the shots to like six feet and the announcers were just going crazy. What an aggressive.

shot. That was amazing. First of all, you don't know where he was aiming just based on the outcome. But if you do think he put it there... just to six feet that year he also out of the 11 ish times he hit it in the water three times in the final round the tees are always in the same place and the pin is always in the same place on that hole in the final round so if you think he hit it to six feet on purpose he also hit it in the water on purpose you can't have it both ways

And I would say that when they smoke on up and hit the baseline or hit the sideline, what a shot. There's zero chance that's exactly what he was trying to do. So I got a question for you. So I told you before, we break the court up into four rectangles. So A, B, C, D. B and C are the middle halves of the court, right? And so if I have, let's say, a 4-0 player. All the way from the net to the baseline.

Yeah, from the net. So long vertical. So the court is 27 feet wide. So it's like six and three quarter feet. Each rectangle is that far wide. And so if I say, hey, I want you to aim to letter C. And if you hit it deep to C, that's a really solid play. You're not going to lose any points.

No one's going to be attacking you. If you hit it there, great. If you catch it late and accidentally hit it to B, it's essentially the same thing. You're changing the diagonal of the rally, but it's no different. So you have a solid option, a solid option. If you pull it into D, which is in the corner, that's an amazing shot. It's an accident, but that's amazing. So you have three options. You got solid, solid, amazing. If you were to aim to D on purpose and you hit it, that's amazing.

If you were to catch it late and hit it to C, that's solid. But if you pull it and hit in the alley, that's death. So if you're comparing those two tactics, you go, one of them has two solid options and an amazing outcome. One has one amazing, one solid, and a tragic outcome. Why would you aim to D on purpose? But people have a hard time, I've noticed in tennis, they don't like hitting winners on accident.

hole-in-ones and everything. I want to be able to take credit. There's a guy named David Epstein who's the guy that debated Malcolm Gladwell into accepting that the 10,000-hour rule isn't exactly correct. This guy's a super smart dude from Columbia. He saw me speak at Wharton, actually. economics decision conference. And he asked me if he could come here because he's writing a book on essentially decision making and accepting, embracing variance to optimize performance.

And exactly how he phrased it, because I can never come up with something this smart. He's like, everyone, we want to take agency over our outcome. We want to say I did that on purpose, not I accidentally did that. And what's crazy again in golf, and I assume it's. just as prevalent in tennis, that the best players are also the best strategists. I feel like it would be harder...

to see that because you just don't know if they're better. But in golf, it's just patently obvious that Jack Nicklaus and Tiger are the two best strategists that have ever walked the planet. And this is what's crazy for me is... some of the grief that I get on social media is like, well, everything you talk about is common sense. I'm like, it is, and nobody does it. What you just said about BCD...

is so obvious. And then it would just be math. If I hit it into D, I win this percent of the time, which is going to be higher. If I hit it into C, it's going to be this percent. If I hit it into D. Now, what are the percentages? Weighted average math. What are the percentages I hit it in each of those buckets? And now let's take D and make it 0. Or shifted D and make it 0. The other two had better be really high. But the problem with that is the other two are going to happen also anyways.

Like, would you, the real question is, would you rather be in B or outside of D? Well, I'd rather be in B because that's actually what you're trading. That's the trade. Would I rather accidentally, and even into A. It doesn't sound like A is great because you didn't even mention it, but A is better than wide.

A is an incredible shot. It's just so late you actually miss on the other side of the court. But that's the thing is I always laugh because we'll do games where we say you can only hit into B and C or you lose the point. And they're like, well, we don't want to do that. That's boring. And I'm always like, don't worry, you're not going to hit it in BNC. I've watched you play tennis for a year now. You have no control. It's going to go everywhere.

That's the perfect example of in golf, a lot of college teams will do qualifiers without pins. So if a school like Oklahoma State has their own golf course, we'll play 36 holes qualifying with pins and then 36 holes without pins. had a couple colleges do this where the pins are the same. So the first and third round pins are the exact same and the second and fourth round are. They kind of switch it up a little bit.

And the scoring average 100% of the time is lower without pins. Now, that still is away from optimal because that implies we're taking our wedges and hitting them. probably too conservative. Again, I don't like the word attack, but I'm sure there's certain times where everything is perfect in a tennis shot. It's like, you know what, I can be a little bit more aggressive on this one than I'm running all the way across the court and just hoping to get to it.

But I actually had a PGA Tour player that did this at Clemson who, he had a hole-in-one with a four-iron, but it was without the pin in. And he literally called me, he's like, I had a hole-in-one today without the flag in. Just hit a shot that was, hit the green, they kind of turned away, and then all of a sudden the ball just disappeared and everybody was like,

like oh you're shitting me it's like yeah that's good outcomes are possible even without trying and i think that's the beauty of sport you know back to shot patterns because people always try to take in a little bit too much game theory into

golf. In tennis, you probably could use more because I'm playing a match against you. I know the exact standing of this match. In golf, it's not quite the same way. But I do view, you know, because I'm a former pretty big poker player, and if you know anything about hand ranges which is like if you're ever playing somebody in poker and they're like i put you on that hand they're not good at poker i put you on a range of hands based on your betting pattern

That's exactly what shot patterns are. I'm going to try to get the vast majority. I'm going to make this bet as best I can and then just run the algorithm over and over and over again and see what happens. I mean, it's just like card counting. I can't turn the odds, but I can slightly, you move the odds 3%, it's like you're saying one point more than 100. The best card counters are shifting the odds like 3% or 4%. It's not much, and it makes it just devastating for the casino.

By this point, you're kind of realizing how much I love the way you've communicated things. I got to say one more thing because you mentioned it and you said, I don't like using the word attack, but I think it was one of your videos where you said, I don't really describe things as aggressive or conservative, just optimal.

And so when a player gets a short ball and they come to the net, I don't really view that as an aggressive play. It's just the correct play. Like you can't run back to the baseline. And if someone hits a really deep return. Well, you can't really take that ball and come in. So you've got to play it high and slow and just survive it. You're just playing the appropriate shot in the situation, which you described as optimal. I love that. Yeah, it's just right. I mean, again, it's not.

There's nothing more to it. It's just the correct play. I mean, again, it's funny because I hadn't thought about this analogy in a long time, but if you think about it, every decision you ever make in life is math-based, whether you realize it or not. Something as trivial as crossing the street is a math-based decision. Will I 100% make it across the road? Okay, yes, then I will go. 95%? I'm going to wait a little bit.

Now, there's a pack of lions coming at me that if I can get across the road, surely the cars are going to take them out. I'm going to take a little more risk. I might drop that down to, I don't know, 50%, because I don't really want to be eaten by a lion. I might take it down to 20%. I'd rather dive in a car wreck than get and eat my lion. But that technically is a math-based decision. And so making a math-based decision that you don't even understand the variables and inputs...

Well, that's a bad idea. So every decision, we just break it down into its constituent parts and then lay over some odds and percentages and outcomes. Here's the optimal decision. And if you keep making optimal decisions, you, by definition, are going to get the best results you are capable of.

Hey, seriously, this was a huge treat for me. Like I texted like 20 people I know and I'm like, I got the decade guy on man, you're not going to believe it. So this is great. And it's so easy to learn from other sports. And like you said, it's so comparable. It's so relatable. So thanks so much for your time. Always. Appreciate it. It was fun.

All right. I want to thank Scott for coming on. Like I said, I've learned a lot from him as a golf player, but also as a tennis coach. And I'm sure you can tell why I find him so interesting and how I've used a lot of his ideas and transferred them to tennis.

One big thing, obviously, is the concept of the Tiger 5 and avoiding mistakes. It's something I'm big on for tennis as well. I'm tinkering with the idea of the Stokey 6. I've mentioned it on a few YouTube videos already, but those errors would be missed returns.

double faults, missed plus ones, ground strokes in the net, ground strokes wide, and change of direction errors. Avoiding these common mistakes are the key to improving at tennis, just like avoiding errors is the key to playing better golf.

So you shouldn't be focused on making more birdies when you're playing your next golf round, and you shouldn't become obsessed with hitting more winners in your next tennis match. If you make less mistakes than your opponent, you're probably going to come out on top.