Tactical Analyses in Professional Tennis

Abstract

In tennis, applying a proper game strategy is an important aspect in performance optimization. In this work, we perform tactical analyses for a specific professional tennis player by using a manually annotated data collection of 4,593 points. Primarily, we will apply Subgroup Discovery to find generic characteristics of successful points in tennis and descriptions that are specific for our player of interest. To demonstrate that easily understandable patterns can be gleaned from our method, that are relatively simple to put into practice, we will focus on finding the most important descriptions of won service points. In general, the most profound characterisation of successful service points in tennis are points that last maximally two strokes. For our specific player, we have found that more service points are won if the player avoids hitting a backhand.