New “Head-to-Head View” at TennisAbstract.com

I’m really excited to announce some new features on Tennis Abstract — I hope you like them as much as I do.

Let’s start with the Head-to-Head view, which you can access by clicking near the upper left corner of any ATP player’s page. Marin Cilic, for example:

Click on the “Head-to-Head beta” link, and you get this:

 

As you can tell, there is a huge amount of data available here. What you’re looking at is a statistical summary of every single one of this player’s H2H records at the professional level. (As you’ll see on the page itself, the screenshot doesn’t show it all–there are ten more statistical categories for each H2H, including things like service points won and break point conversion rate.)

By default, the H2H table is sorted by number of matches. But like the standard “Match Results” table on Tennis Abstract, you can sort by most other columns simply by clicking on the column header, like TB (“tiebreaks”) here:

 

Thanks to the power of Tennis Abstract’s filters, there’s a lot more you can do with this view. As you’ve seen, the H2H view defaults to a player’s career results. Let’s say, though, that you want to see Cilic’s H2H records only on clay. Use the filters in the left-hand column as you normally would, and select clay courts:

 

As usual, you can apply as many filters as you want, so you could look at a player’s head-to-heads in a single season, at the Challenger level, in deciding sets, or even show a summary of a player’s head-to-heads against all opponents from a single country.

Specifically for head-to-head purposes, I added a new filter: “Minimum matches.” This way, if you’re comparing a player’s H2H stats against several opponents, you can filter out matchups that haven’t occurred very much. Here’s an example, which shows Cilic’s highest H2H winning percentages, minimum five matches:

 

I also added another new filter that will come in handy on the standard results tab as well: “Vs Current Rank.” (The separate “Vs Rank” filter, which has always been on the page, filters by opponent rank at the time of the match; the new filter uses the most current rankings.) For instance, here are Cilic’s H2Hs against the current top 10:

 

Another neat aspect of the “Vs Curr Rank” filter is the ability to select “Active” or “Inactive” players. (These are determined solely by whether a player is in this week’s ATP rankings.) You could display all H2Hs against active players, or in the traditional Match Results view, quickly identify matches against retired/inactive players.

All of this is available for every ATP player, past and present.

In the process of working on the new features, I made a few other improvements that I hope powerusers will recognize and enjoy. For many statistical columns in both the match results and head-to-head views, I customized the sorting behavior, so matches without stats would automatically go to the bottom. I also made a bit of progress toward making the browser back button work as expected. There’s still some work to do there, but it’s much better than it was a few days ago.

Enjoy!