Top Data Analyst: How to maximize your strategy and win more matches

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So if you want a new, durable backpack that has tons of storage and looks great, sign up for my newsletter, and that link is in the caption for this podcast. And if you just can't wait, I'm also providing a link for 10% off. On today's episode, we've got Tommy Rounds.

Tommy was a poker player who took his knowledge of math into the game of tennis, where he's helped top juniors, collegiate players, and pros maximize their strategy. We talk about what you should be trying to accomplish on your return games.

how you can optimize your serve strategy, and why you should definitely watch video of yourself. So sit back, relax, and prepare to become a smarter tennis player. All right, Tommy, welcome to the pod. It's an honor to be here, Jonathan. Thanks for having me.

So I'm glad you reached out. You have a very unique background, something I'm particularly interested for anyone who follows my pages or listens to the podcast. So before we get going, can you just give a brief background of who you are and kind of what you've been doing in tennis in the last couple of years? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, I'm a lifelong tennis player like a lot of people out there. And after college, I ended up somehow becoming a professional poker player.

And like a lot of people, when the pandemic hit, things kind of shut down. And I revisited tennis for a little bit. And I started to look and see, like, are they doing the kind of stuff we're doing in poker and tennis? And I saw that there was stuff that was being done.

And I saw that there was room to do stuff. And so I ended up pursuing that and ended up working with professionals and some top juniors. I'm not worried. Normally I have, like I told you, I have a list of 12 to 13 questions every episode. I'm like, okay, just in case the answers are short.

We emailed back and forth. We just have a couple topics, and this could be one of my longer episodes. Maybe it'll be a two-parter. The first thing we talked about was the difference between statistical analysis and strategic analysis. So can you kind of... Maybe explain what the differences are and how that's kind of worked into what you did with tennis. Right. So statistical analysis is.

is basically the general approach that you're going to see if you look at what is being done in current tennis analytics. And the way I would define statistical analysis is you grab a bunch of data from past matches or past practices, et cetera.

And then what you're going to do is you're going to look at that data and you're going to try to find patterns from your own play, perhaps, or you're going to try to find outcomes, how you perform based on that historical data. Or you're going to look at your opponents and say, this is what they tend to do.

And this is what they tend to do successfully. Or a third branch would be like, what is an optimal way to serve? What's an optimal first serve percentage? Why don't we look at what the best servers do? and let's see what sort of percentages correlate with the highest serve points won. So that would be a statistical approach. And what I was sort of alluding to was that the idea is that if you do statistical analysis, the strategies just kind of fall out of it.

It's all the same thing. And if you want to actually do strategy work, what you do is you just do statistical analysis. And so, you know, that paradigm sort of creates a situation where data scientists and statisticians are also world class strategists.

there is a difference because certain games and certain scenarios are different. There's a difference between a strategic situation and a non-strategic situation. So the way that I would define strategic analysis... is that statistical analysis looks at that historical data but what it does and it can be an amazing thing but one of the weaknesses is that it doesn't properly account for the fact that strategies

aren't independent, they're interactive and they're dynamic. So strategic analysis, and I put things like game theory under that realm, which we can talk about a little bit more as we go on. But game theory is a branch of mathematics that specifically accounts for the facts.

that strategies are interactive and dynamic. For example, if you and I play a tennis match, what you do is going to influence what I do. So if I'm playing against you and every single time that we're on the deuce side, you're just hitting aces against me.

I'm going to sit there and I'm going to figure out what's going on. Is my positioning off? Is something off? And so if that's happening, I'm going to look for it. And I have the ability to shift and switch that. Statistical analysis, you can try to do those things. But the problem is...

In real strategies, it's just this iterative back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, jockeying, all that stuff. And I'm sure you've encountered that as a coach and a player. When you're playing against somebody, it's kind of this continuous problem-solving thing of back and forth. And so a statistical analysis, you might find...

Like for example, you and I are playing and you have data on me and you realize that 75% I serve out wide to the deuce side and you go, okay, I'm just going to crush this guy. I know exactly where he's going to serve, but I'm not ignorant to that. If every time I hit a serve, I realize no matter how well I hit it, you're always there. At some point, I'm going to figure out that you're reading me. And so the statistical analysis approach or the game theoretic approach recognizes.

whenever I choose to do something, I have to consider how it's going to affect what you do and then kind of this whole back and forth. And it's kind of a suite of methods, I guess you could say. where it allows you to really get deep into that and kind of solve some of those problems. Well, one thing I've always had to question, and I asked Craig O'Shaughnessy, who's big into data on this is, so I'm scouting a guy and he serves wide 80% of the time.

in the deuce. Okay. But he was playing a lefty with a terrible backend. So of course he served wide more like that would make sense. And then I go, okay, well now I'm a righty with a great forehand. So what, what am I supposed to expect from him? How do I tease that out?

And then also how do I tease out what is actually, like you said, you can self-scout, right? So I have stats on myself and I go, well, I've been really successful when I've run this pattern where I've hit my forehand down the line, but that might just be because I played four opponents in a row.

who are really weak in that area. So how do you, you're a smarter man than me, but how do you get that information out? So you know what you're kind of tracking and what you're using to move forward is actually accurate.

Right. Well, I think you should give yourself more credit than you're giving yourself because a lot of people don't even think about the things that you're talking about and you intuitively already get that. So your sample size really does matter. For example, if I were to say, hey, Jonathan, I have 50 matches.

from your past opponent, and we're going to grab all of that data and we're going to figure out exactly what they do, you're sort of rightly alluding to the fact that, well, what about, what if you play against different opponents than me who play different styles? And so...

Large sample sizes, ironically, don't always mean something better. You need to compare like to like. So to answer your question, how do you figure out all of that stuff and how do you do that? Well, you have to actually not just kind of just grab data.

and just say more is better you have to grab like to like and all of a sudden um you start to encounter some other problems what like for example if you're doing stuff on the pro tour how do i get recent data that's not from you know years past when they might have played different

But also, how do I get surface-specific data? Because they only play a certain amount on each surface, right? And how do I tease out lefties? How do I tease out whether somebody's actually playing a similar enough style to me that it might relate to me? It becomes complicated, but to answer your question, I think that the key thing is, first off, if you're going to grab data, you have to make sure you're comparing like to like and not get wide-eyed or caught up in the notion of that.

more data is better. For example, not to fire any shots, but there are other companies that kind of their gold standard way to push themselves to say, we've got the biggest data set of anybody. It might be helpful, but it really might be a bunch of irrelevant data for what we're trying to do with specific players and coaches. So what I would say for you when you're trying to do stuff like that with a player and you see stuff like that.

Make sure that the actual data that you have that's giving numbers is similar enough to the player that you're playing against. Otherwise, I would kind of throw it out the window. But you want to find like to like, grab what you can.

And then you also have, there's some other nuances we can get into as well. It gets a bit tricky, but the example that you mentioned, you may know that somebody does something 80% of the time, but it still actually may be better for you not to do anything about it. And I'll give you a quick example to sort of make that make sense.

Imagine that you're playing against me again and you know that I'm serving out wide 75%. But you also look at my data and you see that when I serve out wide, I actually win less than when I serve up the tee. You don't necessarily need to exploit me or try to attack that because I'm already exploiting myself. You don't want me to stop serving out wide because it's my weakest serve. So anything that you do, if you actually attack it, it puts me in a position where I'm more likely to adjust.

and do the right thing. So you're actually helping me play better. So you have to kind of look a layer deeper. Right. So you're kind of describing a situation where a player likely doesn't understand themselves because they're choosing a suboptimal serving target.

Because they haven't studied themselves. So you've worked with top juniors, you've worked with top pros. Do you spend a majority of the time scouting them so they understand themselves better? Or was it equal to the opponent? Like, what was the balance there?

So that's an interesting question because what ends up happening in my experience is that people want data on their opponents. But my approach is that I think it's more powerful to focus on yourself. For example, I'll use poker. The traditional approach when I started was to focus on your opponents. And then somewhere along the way, some of us discovered game theory. And game theory, just to give like a really quick non-technical definition.

I would say that game theory is a way, instead of focusing on what is my opponent doing and how can I exploit them, game theory is instead focusing on what am I doing and how can I make it balanced and tough enough to deal with so my opponents can't exploit me.

So my primary focus is to focus on the player, number one, because I think it's really powerful and it's been the gold standard in my world. But the second aspect that I think is extremely powerful is that we can control what we do. I can't necessarily control what my opponent's going to do.

I don't know. They may do other stuff. They may do a bunch of different things. But if I'm looking at my play and I see that when I do this, it's predictable and it's theoretically exploitable, we can stop that before it even happens. Or if I look and I see there's something that I'm doing. that's not working that well, we can actually go out to the practice court and we can handle that. So I would say the business aspect of tennis analytics oftentimes requires you to do stuff for the opponents.

But my preference would be to focus probably like 80-20 on the player with a little bit of extra kind of stuff on the opponent. When we talk about, we've mentioned a couple of times, so game theory. So tell me if I'm... Giving you an example of what game theory might be or how I used to use it as a player. So for example, my wide serve in the deuce was easily my best serve. So I usually started most matches with that on a lot of big points, like a 1540 or a 30 all.

I would like to serve wide, but I also didn't do it every time because if I was playing someone who I thought had somewhat of a brain, then I'm like, okay, they're going to know that. So maybe early in the match on a 30-all, I'd go down the tee because I want to save the wide one for later.

But I would always be thinking like, yes, I still want to make sure I'm serving wide more than I'm serving T. But if I always do it at certain scores and I'm playing, like I said, I'm playing someone who's similar to myself, who's trying to pay attention.

Now that becomes super predictable and then both serves won't work very well. So I had my strengths. I knew what I wanted to do. I was using the score and then just trying to get inside their head. And if I served wide on a 40-15 and they looked like they read it. okay, then I'm going to mix that up the next time, even though it's my weaker serve, so that both options become a little stronger later in the match. Is that an example of game theory or what am I talking about there?

I would say so. I think you pretty much nailed it, man. I think that the way that you're doing things with game theory is you're always thinking of the consequences of your actions. So you're going to recognize, yes, I have a certain serve that's better and I want to do that as much as possible. But I also have to recognize that if I overuse it...

my opponent can actually attack that and counter that and kind of take away that value. So I can't go to the well too much, so to speak. So I have to balance that. And so game theory is very hyper-focused on what I would call... uh balance so using a poker example and then i'll use a tennis example but a poker example would be if i never bluff when i play poker my opponents can just fold every time that they don't have a great hand

So I bluff in order to force my opponents to have to call some of the time that I have a good hand. I don't want to get rid of that value. So in tennis, like you were mentioning, if I have an amazing out wide serve, but if my opponent knows they can just stand in the doubles alley and just get it every time.

I've lost my value. So you can almost think of mixing your play up similar to how bluffs function in poker, where I have to serve up to T some of the time at some frequency that I still maintain my value. And there's some technical ways to figure out exactly how much you should do it, and that's where game theory comes into play. But the overall general idea is exactly like what you were saying, basically, where you have to recognize, maybe I have a great play.

But I can't just think about this great play in isolation. I have to consider what's going to happen if they adjust to it. So you're looking at the player strengths that you worked with. You're getting all their data. What are some common...

We'll start with like mistakes or inefficiencies that you say across the board. You have a couple of different players and you go, here are some stats that keep popping up where I see inefficiencies in strategy or games. Was there anything like that that popped up?

I think on the WTA tour especially, there were some players that I did stuff with where I'm not sure if this just was sort of how it worked out or if this is just the players that gravitated towards being open to this, but I would say the return of serve was problematic for some of these players. Because there's this idea that a lot of coaches have where on the return, you want to kind of take back the initiative. And that's true, but you have to do it in the right moment.

And so I'm going to get into a little bit of math here. I promise it's not going to be complicated. I promise it'll be quick. But the way that I focus, if I'm going to look at a game, I'm going to go very abstract and I'm going to start from places that seem so basic to others.

But there's kind of a purpose to it. So how do you win a match? You win a match by winning points. That's the fundamental unit. A point gets you to a game, a game gets you to a set, a set gets you to a match. And so what branches from that? In tennis, I'm never just playing a point. I'm either serving or returning. So you want to split it up into serve points and return points. And for return points, you can branch even further. What makes up a return point?

Well, the math underneath it all, I'll just use first returns for a simple example. Second returns are a little bit more complicated because you have double faults, but it's the same principle. But for a first return, and I promise this is the only math. It's returns made multiplied by returns won when made. So in other words, how often do I make the return multiplied by how often do I win when I make it? That gives me my first return points. And so...

The reason you do the math is not just to kind of do the math and make it all abstract or whatever. It's for the purpose to figure out how do return points function. And what you realize is that if I want to win more return points, it's one of those two branches.

All the other stuff we know about as tennis players, they come out of that. But I have to figure out which branch I'm dealing with first. Am I not winning because I'm not putting enough in play? Or am I not converting enough? And it's really helpful to know that.

Because what I've seen on the tour is that if you don't know that, coaches will just go out to the service line and just smash balls at their players and just try to grind it out. And if your player's not making enough returns, you really need to know that.

So the thing that I've seen with a lot of players who have tons of talent is that they just don't put enough returns in play to actually allow them to even have a chance. I'll use this one example again. I promised only one math, but one more thing. This isn't exact, and this is just to make the math easy, but let's just say that top returners are winning like 40% of their return points on the first return.

We know that there's kind of a hard limit to how much you can win when you make your return. As a returner, you can't win more than a server does. It's just the way it works. And if you win 50%, that's really a great thing. What that says is that when you get the return back...

It's a coin flip. So if we know that we're trying to get to 40% to be kind of in that top area with some of the top players, and we know that 50% is a good baseline, well, what number multiplied by 50 gives us 40? It's 80. And so if you're an amazing server, you can actually get away with a little bit less. Again, the numbers aren't exact, so you might be able to get away with a little bit less. But I saw players that were in the high 50s or 60s.

on their returns made. And that's just impossible. It's just game over. You're not making enough returns. There's nothing that you can do to win enough return points to get where you want to go. And there's at least five players that I can think of. that could be top 10 players if not top five players that are that are in that boat yeah intuitively like obviously

We probably don't have a ton of pros listening to this podcast, although I do know a few that do. But something that I would coach a junior or my recreational players is basically just to make the return. Because from what I've seen at the amateur level...

Even a short ball is almost an advantage for the person who's going against the short ball because people are so bad at approach shots and volleys. And so I'm going, hey, you know, I'd prefer you to hit the return deep with quality. But even if you hit the world's worst return.

I almost feel like you have a 50% chance to win that point when it's in play, assuming it's your level. And people are usually, like you said, almost trying to get the advantage back or they never want to be on defense. And so that leads them to miss a third of their returns and then they get in this hole.

I don't know if you see that even playing out the pro level, but that's kind of something instinctively I've always said is I've made up a number. Let's say it's 85% because I know a recreational 4-0 stroke is going to break down some. Even if they're choosing the best target in the world, they just can't make.

all of them, but I'm like, Hey, if you can make 80, 85%, I think you're going to break serve a lot, whether it's a short chip or a beautiful deep ball. Is that something that you kind of see even at the pro tour a little bit? Absolutely. I think there is an anxiety like, OK, I want to win this as quickly as possible. I don't want to play defense. And the stronger the return I hit, the more defense I'll play. Or there's like you look at Djokovic and you see him hit return winners.

And let's be honest, it's kind of sexy to see those highlights and you're going to get on the highlight reel. You're going to do all that. And so I think a lot of players think, well, I want to return like Djokovic. I want to do those things. But what they overlook is that Djokovic has unreal fundamentals and he gets...

so many balls back in play. And I guess a really simple, intuitive way to think about it is that when you miss a ball, your chances of winning are zero. If you get the ball back, you have a chance to win the point. So it's extremely powerful because like I said,

there's a limit to how much you can actually raise that other number. And when you look at the math, the only number you can raise high is that returns made. And so that's the one that you really want to leverage. And I'll say one more quick thing about that, if you don't mind. One of the things that you'll hear a lot on commentary is that they love talking about how the middle return is amazing because it cuts off the angle and I'm not gonna say that's not a thing but

The real power of the middle return is that it just lets you get more in play. It lets you leverage that math. So you can actually hit that return and still take a cut, but it allows you to get that ball right back in play way more often. And that's something that everybody...

recreational players and pros can really, really use and take advantage of, I think. That's something that I learned for golf from Scott Fawcett, who was on the podcast earlier. And he talked about the difference of where you aim and where you hit. So I have a girl.

Here, she's a, actually, she's a senior in high school now and she hits the hell out of the ball way too fast. I can't get her to hit slow, but I always tell her to aim middle. And she went to Spain and went to the Nadal Academy and she said, oh, you know, my coach likes me to hit middle. And they're like, oh no, you should try angles.

And when she told me that, I said, no, no, no, I want you to aim middle. I don't want you, like, I don't think you're going to hit middle. I actually think you're going to hit everywhere but the middle because I've watched you. Your control is horrible. So by aiming middle, yes, you could jam them up.

But also you just have so much more room for error where you will accidentally hit great returns. And if you hit the return perfectly, then yeah, maybe you do jam them up. But just getting that ball in play for me as a coach is massive. And I'm glad to hear that there's a little bit of data to back that up.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's so true. And that's another great point that you just mentioned that you can think about your directional choices as like you have a distribution of outcomes. And what I mean by that is when I aim to hit a shot, unfortunately. I don't hit it everywhere, that same spot every time. And so if you were to track your data, you could look and there'd be kind of a distribution of outcomes or maybe even like a circle.

And the wider that is, the bigger the target you're going to have to hit. Otherwise, you're just going to miss too often. So if you have a player like the one that you mentioned, she may not have the control. And in a perfect world, it'd be awesome to hit that hard and hit with control.

But she's not there yet. And so for her, it might be frustrating. But for her, it's going to be so much better for her just to take the right target and allow her to take her full stroke. So we're talking about returns on the flip side for serving strategy.

I saw a long time ago that Craig O'Shaughnessy posted something where it was like the people with the highest first serve percentages, at least on the men's side, usually lost like first round. Like none of them made it that far. And so there's some type of blend. Obviously you can't serve a 50% first serve.

But if you're serving 75%, unless you're Isner, it probably means you're spinning it in. So we know where the return inefficiency is, but kind of what is the optimal serve statistic or serve strategy that most people could use?

You know, so that one's an interesting one because... I would, you know, the best answer for this is kind of the worst answer in a way, but it's still good. And it's that it depends. And I know that that's not always the most fun answer, but it really depends on you as an individual. But in general, I would say in the Pro Tour, what Craig was alluding to.

is actually true you want to strike the right balance and there's this idea that kind of i don't want to miss i don't want to miss serves i don't want to miss serves but that oftentimes means that you're not being aggressive enough to take advantage of when you get it in so The ideal way to do this, typically going back to what we mentioned at the beginning, statistical analysis versus strategic analysis, a statistical approach would be, let's find the players with the top serve points won.

and then let's look and see what sort of first serve percentages correlate with that. And then we'll kind of tease from that what the optimal first serve percentage is, and then we'll prescribe that to our players, et cetera. The problem with that is that serve points one, it has a little bit of a more complex calculation that's going on underneath it. Your serve points one relates to your first serve percentage, your first serve points one when you've made them.

as well as your second serve points one. And here's kind of a simple example to hopefully illustrate that. Imagine that I, when I'm serving, if I have to hit a second serve, my second serve points one is zero. And I currently... and making 80% of my first serves because I'm afraid I don't want to hit a second serve. And somebody comes along and says, hey, we did this statistical analysis. 60% is optimal. Well, for me,

probably going to be a bit dicey because now I'm going to have to hit double the second serves. Instead of 20%, I have to hit 40% and I win 0% when I do it. So the optimal way to figure out what your particular first serve percentage is. You need to factor in individually how often do you win when you hit a second serve? And how often do you win when you make that serve? And you have to factor it all in as one kind of complex thing. So a general rule of thumb for people out there.

the more you actually win, the stronger your second serve is, the more you can be aggressive on that first serve because you don't lose as much. It's not as much of a punishment. And likewise, the more that your first serve is successful when you make it, like if you have just a killer serve when you make it, you can potentially afford to be more aggressive, provided your second serve isn't super weak.

So it's a combination of all those things. And like I said, the best answer, it's the true answer, but there is kind of a little bit of a calculation that goes underneath it. But you can figure that out. But for people who want to just kind of...

go for it and just kind of figure it out on their own. I would just ask yourself, honestly, like how confident, how strong is my second serve? Are people teeing off on it? If so, I might have to be a little bit less aggressive than someone else. If I have a great kick serve and people are like, man.

Your second serve is almost better than your first. Then you can probably be that person who actually just really, really goes for it on your first serve. So one thing I think about myself in hindsight, I had a great serve and I used to just kind of keep my own stats because even in. I stopped playing 2006. So back then it's not like we took a lot of video, but I'd have some and I would just know my basic percentages and everything. And I had a good second serve, but in hindsight.

I might be served 65%. And I was, I think now I'm like, man, maybe I should have mixed in a lot of first serves as second serves because I made a high percentage. I won a high percentage when I did it. And yes, my second serve was solid. But when I was playing Kevin Anderson, a John Isner, a Benny Becker, it might have been nice not to just hit a 90-mile-an-hour kick serve right in their wheelhouse every time and at least surprise them.

Is that a viable tactic when you've been looking at that on the tour? Obviously, it does depend on the specific player. But are there enough players out there? We're like, you know what? There are probably 10 to 15 people who should be experimenting with that idea of.

either hitting two first serves or at least mixing that in more than they do. Absolutely. And that's an awesome insight. Ironically, a friend from poker of mine, I was speaking to about some of this stuff and he had, he wasn't really a tennis player, but his mom was a collegiate tennis player.

And she took him to a match. And that was one of the first things he asked me. He said, do they have to hit a first serve on a second serve some of the time? Can they just let them move in like that and kind of exploit that? The answer is yes, and there's two ways to think about it. The one way to think about it, I think people tried this, I think it was Zverev actually, where his second serves, he was really struggling with those double faults.

And the way you would do it is you would look at his first serve points one when made, and then you would just multiply it by his first serve percentage. And then that number you would compare to his second serve points one. And if that number was higher...

it's better for him to hit the first serve as a second serve. So that's kind of one branch. Like if your second serve is really weak, you could do it that way. Do you have a follow up? Go ahead. Well, no, no, keep going on that. Cause yeah, obviously if your second serve.

is weaker than you probably can't. I mean, there's probably, I guess the math, the basic math I used to do in my head was like, well, if I'm winning 80% of these and I have this free shot on my first, I want to make sure I go for that. And then I am more, I guess there's one more element that.

most people struggle with is I'm a robot, but a lot of people are emotional, especially about double faults. So then I say, go ahead and first serve is your second serve, but now they're actually going to be tighter.

Whereas I would argue that I think I would make more first serves on my second chance because I have feedback on what just went wrong. Yeah, that's a great point. And I think that you would be the perfect candidate for doing this because you raised a great point. Some of the stuff you come up with and you're like, hey, this would be optimal.

But people are like, you're going to make me double fall 10% more? I can't deal with that. I don't want to call any players out. I won't name her name. But there's a player who had a lot of success as a young player and then was struggling a bit. And I was watching a match with her and her first serve percentage was like 75%. But every time she missed, she was just like, you know, the rolling her eyes and 75% is making a lot, you know.

So she was one of those players that I think it would be probably a disaster to say, hey, be more aggressive on that. Allow yourself to double fault more. Someone like you would be a perfect candidate. So the second part that I was going to get to before that is that.

If you have a bad second serve, you definitely want to check and see, like, what's my first serve percentage? What's my first serve points one? Multiply those two numbers together. And if it's higher than your second serve points one, then you probably want to consider actually hitting some first serves, if not switching over. But the second place that my buddy from poker was alluding to is the sort of game theoretic aspect where...

okay, if my opponent knows that I'm going to hit a way softer kick and they can move in all the time, can I let them do that? Do I want to actually throw some first serves in there so I kind of force them to be pinned back behind the baseline more? And so...

Nobody's done that in tennis yet. And part of the problem is the analysis has been focused on that first method that I mentioned, where you just compare how often I make it, how often I win when I make it to second serve points one. The problem is if you do that,

You're only looking at how often a first serve wins when my opponent is also prepared for me for hitting my first serve. So what I want to do is I want to see how often I win on my first serve when my opponent doesn't know when sometimes they get tricked and they're actually moving in too early. that would tell me more often like is this a viable strategy to mix in and i i can't say for sure but i'm pretty confident that there are certain players that

absolutely would do better by switching that in, some of the time at least. And it would really, I mean, you just think about it intuitively from a returner's perspective. If I know that my opponent will sometimes hit a kick and sometimes blast the ball. It's going to make it a lot harder for me to move in and figure out exactly what to do. Yeah. Pitchers in baseball throw change-ups. And I used to intentionally take five miles an hour off my first serve.

just hoping I could get a guy out in front. Every once in a while, I would kick a first serve just to see, oh, they're far back. That allowed me to serve in Bali and get closer. So there's definitely that element. It's actually funny. We had a guy at Duke. He was our worst server by a mile.

objectively like by every metric but when he would play doubles his serve was so slow he would generate the most missed returns because people weren't quite ready for it to be that slow but then they also overhit because they're like wow this is just sitting there And so he did a lot better than he would have thought. And he had the highest missed return percentage as a server, even though we hit very slow.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And you're right. It's a great analogy to a change up. And I think a lot of players don't do that. So we don't really have data to look at it. So it's easy to kind of just write the play off.

But what you'll find through experience a lot of times, and you kind of have to track this and see what happens, but you will see that, like you said, that happens. Like drop serves, for example, people don't do that for a variety of reasons. One, I think Andy Murray said that people don't do it because...

They feel really embarrassed. Like if it works, you look great. If it doesn't work, you kind of look silly. And then there's also the crowd will jeer you and boo you and all that kind of stuff. But if you look at some of the people who do it, like Kyrgios, he's had ridiculous success when he does it.

So, but he just kind of does it as a novelty play when in actuality, from a change of perspective and given how some people return against him, there's a lot of reasons to think that it's actually a very solid play.

And that you would probably see that if more players were willing in the ATP tour. Yeah, this is like so up my wheelhouse. Like I could do this. This is absolutely perfect. In regards to serving, is there a... statistic that most directly obviously the goal when you serve is to hold serve win a point and then obviously points lead a game right so i just want to hold serve is there a particular statistic that

most correlates to holding serve or winning more points well serve points one is just is like in the tour on the the professional game the serve points one is just really really powerful because most players don't have you know disaster second serves so

They can afford, I would say if you want a general idea from like professional players, the most common thing that I would say most people could do is be more aggressive and allow themselves to miss more often because by picking, you know,

Smaller targets or being more aggressive. They're gonna up that first three points one and that allows them to you know benefit in a huge way because they don't lose too much they're not they're not really a lot of them don't have really disastrous second serves so i would say that that's probably the best uh place to focus on

I guess it would make sense because this would be the opposite of what we spoke about earlier. I have a friend. He used to live in Raleigh near me. His name's Sig Mydal. So he is now, he's a different version of you. He used to be a poker player. He is the assistant GM for the Baltimore Orioles. but he's never played baseball, but he just, he knows how to scout. He knows how to look at the numbers and figure out who's good. And he did some like.

Little bit of stat work for me when I was at Duke. And one thing that he said that was super important was that unreturned serves. So he's like, look, if you, whether you serve 55% or 65 or 70, whatever. If you have a high percentage of serves that aren't coming back, you are likely to hold. Now, if you obviously can be aggressive and make serves, that'll be even higher. But then of course there was that limit. So have you seen that as well? I mean, we talked about making returns earlier.

But is there that like, that's something I've always taught from that moment is like, hey, if we can, if we have a quality serve, let's see how many we can get that don't come back. And let's kind of work off that. Absolutely. It's the corollary. If you're a returner, your goal is to make returns. Conversely, as a server, my goal is I don't want you to do that because I know that every return back gives you a percentage of the point. And every return you miss, you get zilch. I get it all.

um you know definitely definitely trying to leverage those things and being uh not afraid to be aggressive enough and that that is something for players that are outside the pro realm what i do see like when i did stuff in college there were certain players that were You would think that they're hitting to the body, but they weren't actually hitting to the body. It was their idea of trying to hit out wider of the tee, but they were just so afraid to miss. So allowing them to go, you know what?

it's so it's not only okay to miss missing is not bad and i think that part of the practice court mentality that some people have growing up kind of makes that tough because you feel like when you miss a serve you made a mistake but

It's just kind of baked into what you're trying to do. I'm trying to actually give my opponent a really tough ball to return. And by doing that, I'm going to miss some of the time and it's totally okay. I ask my players all the time, what's the one shot you can miss and win the point?

And it usually takes them a while before they go, Oh, a first serve. Yeah. It is a free shot. And for me with a good serve, I'm like, why would I not take my free chance at winning a point when like, what am I afraid of? Cause my second serve was good. So. You know, if I could take two looks at a forehand, I wouldn't just hit a high, heavy topspin forehand in the middle of the court on my first chance if I knew I had a second one right behind it. And I think, like you said, people just get.

obsessed with if the serves going in or not. And I don't think they take advantage enough. And obviously they don't practice their serves enough to maybe qualify for that strategy.

You're right. They really don't leverage that you'll see players who have first and second serves Like if you walk by the court, you might not know which serve they're on because they look so similar but um you really do want to leverage that for that exact reason because you actually you're not going to lose the point and so you want to take advantage of that and you want to make things as difficult for your opponent as possible and i would say the only people who

really need to kind of like put the brakes on are people whose second serves are just a total disaster but most people it really is not like that you know and it's and the more and if yours is you kind of have to confront that at some point you know you have to do what you have to do And if your second serve is such a disaster that you can't play properly on the first, that's kind of your first signal, okay.

I really need to make sure I take care of this because I'm really hampering myself in a big way by not allowing myself to play properly aggressive on that first serve where I have one of the biggest advantages, if not the biggest advantage I'm going to have in the entire tennis match. I'm going to ask you two questions and I'll let you answer it in the order that you think makes most sense. How would one...

a recreational player out there, I can tell people to eat vegetables and drink water and exercise so they can lose weight. And I can tell people to video matches and keep stats so that they can better understand themselves. And I know both people aren't going to do either of those things, right?

I know they're not videoing as much as I want. So how do you improve your game when you don't have access to stats? And the second question I would have is, is it more dangerous to have no stats or only a very small sample size of stats?

Those are great questions. I'm going to go with the first one. It's a little bit easier. In poker, we do stuff, we have these things that are called solvers, and it's basically computers that play against each other billions of times and figure out optimal strategies. And over time, that's what we've gravitated towards to figuring out how to play.

And we use those and we study from them and we do all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of the gold standard way to play and figure out how to play. But before that, we had to do things without that. And one of the tricks and one of the cool things you could do is you could actually pretend that you're playing against yourself.

Bringing this back to tennis, imagine that you're playing against an opponent and you're sitting there and you're game planning. How am I going to beat them? What am I going to do? What are their patterns? What are the areas that I'm going to get them on? What are they maybe going to try against me? Yada, yada.

A super powerful thing that everybody can do that really helps, it really does, is that you can pretend that you're playing against yourself. So you sit down and you go, okay, I'm going to play against myself. I'm not like a fresh blank slate. I know everything about myself. I'm like this hypothetical, really, really difficult opponent to play with who knows all my tricks. How would I beat myself? Where would I go?

What are the things that I would do? What are the tendencies that I have that people can take advantage of? And that's kind of step one. And once you've done that, you go, okay, well, how can I stop that? Pick one of the things. What can they do that's really attackable in my game right now? And what can I do to stop my opponents? What can I do to beat them to the punch? And you might find...

There's two kind of types of weaknesses that I would categorize in tennis and they're structural weaknesses and pattern-based weaknesses. And a structural weakness would just be like a physical weakness, like a stroke technique.

Or maybe you don't move to the left as well because you hurt your knee when you were playing basketball growing up or whatever. A structural weakness is something you can't fix during a match. And those are super powerful because it doesn't matter if your opponent knows you're doing them.

You can't stop them. Pattern-based are things like, okay, they do this, this much, et cetera. So if you find a structural weakness when you're kind of doing this little exercise, that's your first order of business. Like go out to the practice court, start working on that.

If you find a pattern-based weakness, it's still important, but you want to start to play around with ideas and go, okay, I do tend to serve 75% out wide just because I like it. How can I stop my opponent from being able to possibly attack that? Okay, I have to mix it up a little bit more.

Well, if I mix it up this much, what can they do in response? And you kind of play this back and forth game as much as you're willing to go. And the more you're willing to do it, the better. But what you end up finding is that if you do this, and I've personally done this in poker before we had our tools.

you can make dramatic improvements to your game and realize crazy things about your own play. But the secondary benefit is that if you want to exploit opponent's tendencies or you want to be that kind of person that goes after them, It's an amazing exercise because you get really good at finding things just by looking at yourself. And usually we don't all have unique weaknesses. There might be a weakness I have that other people tend to have as well.

And so when I find those things doing this exercise, I might find something that I'm like, you know, dang it, this is really hard to figure out how to stop them from attacking this. And that's a great clue for you to go, okay, I'm going to look for this in other people.

Because that's really hard to deal with. So for people who don't have data, I mean, I think that that's just honestly the absolute best way to kind of, if you're thinking from a strategic standpoint, video is amazing. A friend of mine in... that Coach's College told me I was working with one of his players and I was going to help her do a project related to this type of stuff for a class. And, you know, time didn't work out, but she ended up just...

Watching some video and her mind was blown. She'd never watched video of herself just from watching the video She found all these crazy things. So if you don't want to do like what I'm talking about like this kind of hardcore strategies type thing If you just watch video, it really is like the vegetable thing. Like you said, it's I promise it's going to help you.

but it's going to help you more than you would ever realize. Like you'll see some things and it's just going to, you're going to be like, oh my gosh, you know, I do that. And then it's going to, it's so powerful and it's so motivating for you to actually go out to the practice court when you've actually seen it for yourself.

I know myself very well and I knew this was going to happen. Most of my episodes are around 30 minutes or so and I'm looking at my recording and I see an hour and one minute. This has been... So interesting for me. Hopefully people don't have a headache because they were thinking more than they usually think, but it's so important and I absolutely love this. So thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. For the people out there, the same thing. I hope it was enlightening and not too much of a headache, but it was an honor to be here and a pleasure. All right. I want to thank Tommy for coming on the show. A lot of numbers and ideas thrown out there. The simple takeaways. Make your returns. Aim middle to help yourself do that. On your serve, if you have a quality second serve, you have a lot of options that are probably all going to be successful.

If your second serve sucks and it's not reliable, you have very few options and you're going to be in serious trouble. So go out, work on making returns and second serves and watch your level skyrocket. Just another reminder to sign up for my newsletter. I send out emails one or two times a month with more helpful tips, and I'll be giving away lessons, spots in future camps, as well as that beautiful ADV backpack for players who are in my Substack community.

So click on that link in the podcast notes if you like free stuff and getting better at tennis. Thanks again for listening. I hope you just improved to tennis without even hitting a ball.