Italian translation at settesei.it
Some people always want tennis matches to be shorter. Among the many recurring proposals to accomplish that, one that has been implemented in some places is eliminating service lets. In other words, serves are treated the same way as any other shot: If the serve clips the net and lands in the box, it’s in play.
“No-let” rules have been adopted by World Team Tennis and American university tennis. In the latter case, eliminating lets has more to do with ensuring fair play in the absence of an umpire. In 2013, the ATP experimented with no lets on the Challenger tour for the first three months of the year.
With an umpire on every professional court and machines that detect service lets at tour-level events, fairness (or avoiding cheating) is not the issue here. The reason we’re talking about this is that service lets take time, and apparently time is the enemy.
How much time?
The Match Charting Project has tracked lets in most of the 2,500-plus matches it has logged. Thus, we have some real-life data on the frequency of service lets. For today, I’ve limited our view to matches since 2010, which still gives us more than 2,000 matches to work with.
The average men’s match in the database, which consists of 151 total points, had six first-serve lets and fewer than one (0.875) second-serve let. Women’s matches are similar: Of the typical 139 points, there were 4.5 first-serve lets and 0.8 second-serve lets.
Let’s estimate the extra time all those lets are taking. After a first-serve let, most players restart their preparations, so let’s say a first-serve let is an extra 20 seconds. When the second serve is a let, most players are quicker to try again, so call that 10 seconds.
For the average men’s match in the database, that’s an extra 128 seconds–just over two minutes. For women, that’s 99 extra seconds per match. In both cases, the time consumed by service lets is less than one second per point. Just about any other rule change aimed at speeding up the game would be more effective than that.
Even at the extremes, it’s tough to argue that service lets are taking too much time. Of all the matches in the charting database, none had more than 24 service lets, and that was in the 2012 London Olympics marathon between Roger Federer and Juan Martin Del Potro. Using the estimates I gave above, those 20 first-serve and four second-serve lets accounted for just over seven minutes of the total match time of 4:26.
Only one of the 1,000 women’s matches in the database featured more than 17 service lets or more than five let-attributable minutes: Petra Cetkovska‘s three-set upset of Angelique Kerber at the 2014 Italian Open. That outlier included 22 lets, which we would estimate at a cost of just under seven minutes.
Playing service lets wouldn’t destroy the very fabric of tennis as we know it, but it also wouldn’t substantially shorten matches. By changing the let rule, tennis executives would needlessly annoy players and fans for no noticeable benefit.