Jai-Alai Question of the Week


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A Chess Concept

Posted on November 8, 2004 at 03:04:08 PM by Craig G

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.

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