In chess, among skilled players, the advantage of having the first
move is huge for white. Here is a quote I just grabbed from a
randomly chosen website:
"White has an advantage that translates into a winning ratio
of approximately 55:45 at the grandmaster level."
Therefore, when playing with black against a similarly skilled
opponent, in the beginning of the game you are usually struggling
to obtain equality, or "equalize", first, and only then
try to build an advantage.
How this could relate to jai-alai is that you can think of the
development of a point in the same way. Eg: in singles, with a
strong serving front courter who has the ability to take control
of the point immediately, you could say that the receiver would
often lose to a chic-chac or some other kill shot, and never reach
equality at all. Similarly, in doubles, the receiver might steal
the serve and win outright, or at least put the serving team into
a defensive hole.
How this relates to Tiger's question is that as an expert jai-alai
observer, you might choose to identify top level serve-grabbers
who are unimpressive in their "all-court" play once
equality has been reached. Which might simply mean "in those
cases where the serve was not picked". In theory, these players
would do much better in posts 2 and 3 than in post 1.
A related observation would be that if you noticed a singles player
who normally gets no advantage from his serve, and yet still does
well overall, then if suddenly you see his serving improve, he
should have a big advantage. Other things being equal, of course.
