Jai-Alai Question of the Week


Start of Thread

Conventional Wisdom needs help

Posted on November 18, 2004 at 06:10:58 PM by Craig G

If "Conventional wisdom says the server has the advantage in singles, the receiver in doubles", then CW could really use some help.

Those advantages are POTENTIAL only.

Think about professional tennis.

If all you ever watched was WTA matches with women 5 ft 7 inches and under, you might reasonably ask "Serve advantage... where?" That is because players of that physique and power level do not get much advantage on serve.

But if you watched the top men at Wimbledon, eg Pete Sampras, Goran Ivanisevic, etc, you would probably want a rules change because you would be sick of seeing nothing but "ace, service winnner, weak return with an easy net putaway".

The point being that the geometry and general layout of a the tennis court offer a POTENTIAL huge advantage to the server. But it takes the right kind of player to demonstrate it.

Now in jai-alai it is not so different. If the only singles points you ever watched consisted of Goiko and Elizegi at Miami, and Arriaga and Celaya at Dania, and only when they were on top of their games, you might reckon the serve advantage to be in the 75 to 80% range. Seriously.

OTOH, if you focused exclusively on some of the early game backcourt guys, you might conclude that it is a disadvantage to serve, since they frequently have more singles success when receiving.

So, as I see it, the entire premise is fatally flawed because you are lumping every kind of player together and expecting the average result to be meaningful.

Just look at the last couple of years in Orlando. Every player on the roster, no matter how young or old, tall or short, thick or thin, was drafted into playing singles. Do you think they all got an advantage when serving?

My hypothesis would be that if you had several independent experts watch the singles games and use their judgement to tell you who gets advantage when serving, as well as who gets nothing, you would then be able to do some useful data mining.

Home Page