Introduction

So, what have you stumbled upon here? I'd like to think that you've found the future site of next-level thinking on the sport of tennis.

I've always casually followed the sport, sometimes more seriously than others, but really got into the intricacies and details within the past year or two. Like many people my age, I grew up during the era of sabermetrics and Bill James, trying to figure out why baseball works the way it does. So, when I get into a new sport, I tend to approach it from that angle. However, when I started looking for research and articles on tennis from this angle, I was disappointed to find that not very many exist. Most of what was out there was focused on gambling (which is admittedly good and fun) or very basic work on player tendencies (which most players seemed to avoid as overly complicated).

One thing that stuck out to me, though, was how the tennis season worked as far as player freedom was concerned. There really isn't another sport where the players can freely move up and down the rankings and tournaments, with some restrictions, and dictate how they want to approach their career. Each week, as most tennis aficionados know, there are usually multiple ATP-level, Challenger, and Futures events, usually on different surfaces, and in most parts of the world. Every player approaches it differently, but based on the point system, money awards, and the general whims of young adult tennis players, nobody seems to tackle it the same way.

So, at its essence, this is what I'm going to try to tackle. The way the tour is structured leads itself to create inefficiencies that can and probably are being exploited by players in the ATP. When the difference between a player ranked 50, 75, and 100 are very subtle in terms of skill, any little mastery of the system can make for a big difference in terms of points, money, and so on. Just like a player wouldn't approach his career without a coach helping him with his technical game, he probably shouldn't be approaching it without a coach helping him with his schedule.

What will this blog be? For now, I guess it will kind of be a placeholder and repository for my ideas on what's happening in tennis. I'd like to provide daily or every-other-daily commentary on the tour beyond the gossip or basic news and hit a big-picture issue on a weekly basis.

This week, the men (I'm sticking to just the men for now until my research catches up) are in Cincinnati, with Challengers in Cordenons, Italy, San Sebastian, Spain, and Karshi, Uzbekistan.

Because most of the Tour is focused on Cincinnati at the top level, there's not a whole lot to get into there. The qualifying rounds at Cincinnati were particularly tough, on par with a solid 250-level event, with a median player rank of 81. As a comparison, the Montreal qualifier last week had a median player rank of 233.5 (Thanks, Canadians!), Washington's main draw was 83.5, and Atlanta's main draw was 89. So, yeah, not really a great situation for those trying to qualify in, but with no alternate hard court tournament in the Americas, it was either play it or skip it.

As for the Challengers, this week is as good as any to introduce a couple of our scheduling rules:

1. Events in countries where there aren't many elite tennis players are full of opportunity for easy points and money. I don't have the numbers tallied yet, but we can almost be sure that there will be value in Uzbekistan this week.

2. For the love of God, avoid clay court tournaments in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, or other countries with several top 200 players. These events are generally loaded and terrible values. The damage may be slightly mitigated this week because there are two events to spread out the quality/mediocrity.

3. Challengers are an investment. Although there are players that use the Challenger circuit to eke by a with a livable income for a while (and God help them), the real goal of any tennis player should be the money of the 250 events and up. Otherwise, settle down, meet a good partner, start a family, get that country club pro career going, and stop wasting your time on the road. Find the best opportunity for points and ignore the lure of slightly better money in the Tretorn Tennis Purgatory Series or whatever they're calling it these days.

So, yeah, Uzbekistan good. Italy and Spain bad.