Optimizing tennis strategy: a data-driven analysis of point importance

While many tennis players focus on developing technical skills such as strokes, footwork patterns, and serving/receiving, it’s equally important to place enough attention on the strategic and mental aspects of the sport. It’s crucial to develop a comprehensive approach to the game that encompasses both technical proficiency and strategic decision-making. This research project focused on winning and losing probabilities from different scores to analyze the importance of winning individual points in a tennis game. The guiding research topic for this study addresses how winning or losing at different scores of a tennis game affect one’s chance of winning the game, and how the importance of different scores relate to one another. We hypothesized that the most important score of a tennis game would be 30:30 (server score: receiver score), and that scores which are closer and occur later in the game have higher importance relative to other scores. In the analysis, 30:30 turned out to be second most important point, and the overall data moderately supported the hypothesis as points which were representative of close and later-occurring scores were generally more influential. However, the main takeaway was a new insight, that points which demonstrated the receiver to be winning, such as 15:40 and 30:40, generally had the greatest effect on the outcome of the game. Using the results of this project, players can realize which points are scientifically most important to win so that they can save essential tactics such as a wide serve or defensive receive for crucial points.