Category: Lefties

Everybody’s a Tricky Lefty

Tennis players like routine, so maybe that’s what makes left-handed opponents “tricky.” The phrase “tricky lefty” is so common as to be a cliché, leading me to ask on Twitter last night whether there’s such a thing as a lefty who aren’t described as tricky.

A few of you responded, suggesting names such as Petra Kvitova and Rafael Nadal. It’s true, great left-handed players win matches because they’re great, not because they’re unusual. Plenty of adjectives come to mind for Petra and Rafa before “tricky.” Tour coach Marc Lucero suggested a broader framework:

I suspect Marc is right, and he would know better than I would. It doesn’t make sense that all lefties are tricky, even if players don’t face them very often.

Let’s be pedantic and go back to my original question, though: Are there any lefties who aren’t described as tricky? Mihaela Buzarnescu is certainly no Kvitova, but she is more aggressive than the average WTAer, at least according to Match Charting Project stats. To answer this question, I did some hardcore 21st-century research and googled it.

More specifically, I googled the following:

“tricky lefty” tennis

That’s not a perfect filter, because it excludes things like “tricky left-hander,” “a lefty whose tricky game…” and so on. But it gives us a good overview. Skipping over results with instructional content (“how to handle a tricky lefty serve!”) and pages discussing amateur players, here are the first 27 players Google told me are tricky lefties:

Alas, the world’s content writers do not hold to Lucero’s logically consistent definition. While some of the examples that Google gave me come from blogs, which we might not expect to maintain high editorial standards (pot, kettle, etc), one of the mentions of Nadal’s trickiness came from a very respectable publication, written by a pundit whose name you would know. Many of the other players were described as tricky on the tour websites, or in direct quotes from players. (Caroline Wozniacki used the t-word for Buzarnescu.)

Are lefties tricky?

As I said at the outset, tennis players like routine. Unless you’ve reached the finals at Roland Garros, facing a lefty is out of the ordinary. It’s the same type of unusual as drawing an opponent with a monster serve (Ivo Karlovic is incessantly deemed “tricky”) or a finely-honed backhand slice. There’s a whole range of tired tennis tropes for the underspinners–they “slice and dice” (really? they chop up the tennis balls into small cubes?), and their trickiness is rivaled only by how “crafty” they are.

We can’t quantify this unless we reframe the question. If lefties are tricky–or, let’s say, they have more capacity to be tricky than right-handers do–it’s roughly equivalent to saying that left-handers have an advantage. And if southpaws have an edge, we’d expect to see more of them in high-level tennis than in the population as a whole.

Is there a disproportionate number of lefties? This was one of the first tennis analytics questions I tried to answer, almost exactly a decade ago, and my conclusion then was: not really.

In February 2011, 12 of the top 100 players in the ATP rankings were left-handed. That includes Nadal, who complicates things a bit, as he’s a natural righty. 10% of the population is left-handed, so 11 natural-born lefties out of 100 players is awfully close to what we’d expect if there was no advantage.

Don’t read too much into this, but things have changed a bit! At the moment, 15 of the top 100 ATPers are left-handed. (Still including Rafa, of course.) There’s only about a 4% chance that there would be so many lefties purely due to chance, or 7% if you class Rafa with the natural-born righties. It’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, and the case gets weaker when we broaden our view. There are 12 lefties among the next hundred male players, and only 18 lefties–fewer than we’d expect from chance alone–in the WTA top 200.

Paradoxically, the more lefty regulars on tour, the less uncomfortable they are to face. Put another way, the trickier they are, the less tricky they are.

There may well be an advantage to left-handedness, and its inherent trickery, in the junior or amateur ranks. (There is certainly an advantage when facing me!) But the evidence is flimsy that it extends to the highest level of the game. The real trick would be convincing everyone to start using a different adjective or–gasp!–treating non-superstar lefties as individuals with games that aren’t interchangeable, even if they do all use the same dominant hand.