Saturday, January 30, 2010

Update - Aussie Open & Big Point Performance

Just a quick update on "Big Point Performance" during this year's Aussie Open. In our book, we developed an interesting statistic for tennis that attempts to study a tennis player's focus and performance on "big points."

How is this measure performing during this year's Aussie Open? Starting in the fourth round of the tournament, we used our "Big Point Performance" (BPP) to predict how players might perform in the next round of the tournament. So far, this indicator has been 8-4 in men's and women's singles matches, starting in the quarterfinals.

The indicator correctly predicted some of these upsets:
  • N. Li over Venus Williams
  • Cilic over Roddick
  • Murray over Nadal
Since our last post on this topic, this is how some other BPP predictions fared:
  • Murray over Cilic -- correct
  • Federer over Tsonga -- correct
  • Henin over S. Williams -- wrong. Our "leading indicator" which has been a good predictor -- this time told the story of the match. Serena Williams and Justine Henin played a good three-set match that was very close. Williams won 90 total points to 85 for Henin. Winners minus unforced errors was also very close, with Williams at 32-37 for -5 and Henin at 28-32 for -4. However, the difference in the match was Williams converting 6 of 11 (55%) break point chances while Henin converted just 5 of 16 (31%) break points.
In the Men's Final, BPP shows that Roger Federer has been very focused on the big points over his past few matches -- and has been better than Murray in this department. Stay tuned...

We'll continue to track this indicator (build our database for BPP) as well as other statistics that help improve athletic performance and development.