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Originally Posted by Elrazor
Is this also true of the 5th set?
I remember reading some article somewhere like 20 years ago that said the player serving first doesn't win a statistically significant number of matches more than the player returning first. Ever since then I've been content to believe that.
Your post made me check to see if Jeff Sackman (the world's foremost tennis stats expert imo) has ever done any analysis on 5 setters with regard to the server winning more than 50% of the time. Sure enough he has:
https://www.tennisabstract.com/blog/...marathon-sets/
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The result is a pool of 138 matches in which the fifth set ended at 8-6 or higher and we know who served first. Of those, the guy who served first–at 0-0, 1-1, 6-6, and so on–won the match 67 times (48.6%). It’s a coin toss.
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For a bigger dataset, we can look to similar situations. Consider 5-setters that end 7-5 in the fifth. Those don’t have the cachet of matches that go farther, but they are quite epic in their own right. We know who served first in 86 such matches, and of those, the man who served first won only 38 (44.2%). It’s not exactly proof that the first server has a disadvantage, but it does cast more doubt on the conventional wisdom.
Seems like this data contradicts conventional wisdom, despite a small sample size. But wait...
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If want more than 200 or so matches, we need to weaken our definition of “epic.” Tiebreaks aren’t relevant here, since we’re looking for instances where one player was broken under pressure. But we can use best-of-three contests that ended 7-5.
With so many more best-of-three matches on the schedule, our dataset is now much bigger. We know who served first for 753 tour-level matches that ended 7-5 in the third. Of these, the player who served first went 412-341, winning nearly 55% of matches.
If you want evidence that the conventional wisdom is correct, there you go. If a match reaches 5-5 in the deciding set and ends with a break, there is, altogether, a 53% chance that the first server wins.
So this larger sample size for 3rd sets in best of 3 matches confirms conventional wisdom.
Interesting stuff. This article was from 2012.
I found another Sackman article from 2010 in which the data shows a slight advantage for the server. But again, these are only the matches which had an odd number of total games played, since that's the only way to know who served first. In a match where player A had 1 more service game than player B, you'd expect player A to win more often.
https://summerofjeff.wordpress.com/2...now-with-data/
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I have stats for 2674 ATP-level matches from 2010. 1316 of those had an odd number of service games, so we can analyze those. That subset of matches gives us a total of 3464 sets, of which 53.2% were won by the player who served first in that set. That’s a substantial edge.
I decided to run the same test on the 2010 Challenger tour. There, we have 4695 matches, 2255 of which are usable for this purpose, giving us 5274 sets. You couldn’t ask for anything much more consistent: At this level, the first server won 53.0% of sets.
Here's another article on serving first, this one focused on tiebreaks:
https://www.tennisabstract.com/blog/...e-you-an-edge/
I think the only thing we can conclude for sure is that ATP/WTA need to publish more stats and tell us who served first in every match so that we can do a proper analysis using every match.
Last edited by krunic; 07-17-2023 at 09:22 PM.
