I’m in the process of rolling out more stats based on Match Charting Project data across Tennis Abstract. This is one of several glossaries intended to explain those stats and point interested visitors to further reading.
At the moment, the following rally stats can be seen at a variety of leaderboards.
- RallyLen – Average rally length. Not everyone counts shots exactly the same way, so I try to follow the closest thing there is to a consensus. The serve counts as a shot, but errors do not. Thus, a double fault is 0 shots, and an ace or unreturned serve is 1. A rally with a serve, four additional shots, and an error on an attempted sixth shot counts as 5.
- RLen-Serve – Average rally length on service points.
- RLen-Return – Average rally length on return points.
- 1-3 W% – Winning percentage on points between one and three shots, inclusive. On the match-specific pages for each charted match, you can see winning percentages broken down by server. Click on “Point outcomes by rally length.”
- 4-6 W% – Winning percentage on points between four and six shots, inclusive.
- 7-9 W% – Winning percentage on points between seven and nine shots, inclusive.
- 10+ W% – Winning percentage on points of ten shots or more.
- FH/GS – Forehands per groundstroke. This stat counts all baseline shots from the forehand side (including slices, lobs, and dropshots), and divides by all baseline shots, to give an idea of how much each player is favoring the forehand side (or, perhaps, is pushed to one side by his or her opponent’s tactics).
- BH Slice% – Backhand slice percentage. Of backhand-side groundstrokes (topspin, slices, dropshots, lobs), the percentage that are slices, including dropshots.
- FHP/Match – Forehand Potency per match. FHP and BHP (Backhand Potency) are stats I invented to measure the effectiveness of particular groundstrokes. It adds, roughly, one point for a winner and one half point for the shot before a winner, and subtracts one point for an unforced error. On a per-match basis, the stat is influenced by the length of the match and the number of shots hit. Because each point can be counted 1.5 times in FHP (one for a forehand winner, one-half for a forehand that set it up), divide by 1.5 for a number of points that the forehand contributed to the match, above or below average. For instance, a FHP of +6 suggests that the player won 4 more points than he or she would have with a neutral forehand.
- FHP/100 – Forehand potency per 100 forehands. The rate-stat version of FHP allows us to compare stats from different match lengths.
- BHP/Match – Backhand Potency per match. Same as FHP, but for topspin backhands. I’ve occasionally calculated backhand-slice potency as well, but slices are not included in BHP itself.
- BHP/100 – Backhand potency per 100 backhands. The rate-stat version of BHP.