“I Just Started Missing.”
Ever wonder why sports books try really, really hard to get you to place parlay wagers? It’s because the parlay bet, a bet type where you bet on multiple events, and ALL of them...
Why Sprint to Net?
Sprinting to net changes the geometry of the court, in a way that allows you to be aggressive without increasing your miss rate. There are certain shots your opponent can hit that will force...
Certainty is a Feeling (and Cheat Code)
Certainty as an epistemic state is a lie. A human being can never truly be certain about something, and most people have far higher confidence in their predictions than is warranted. That said, certainty...
Stop Losing Winnable Matches
One of the beautiful things about learning a fundamentally sound, fault tolerant forehand, is that the speed of said forehand can be easily dialed up or down, without fundamentally changing the swing. The grip...
The Power of Neutral
At Fault Tolerant Tennis, we talk a lot about offensive tennis. That’s for good reasons, two specifically. When your strokes lack fault tolerance, it’s your offensive tennis that starts to break down first Offensive...
Mixed Strategy – An Antidote to Guessing
A mixed strategy is a strategy in which we mix our shot selection decisions for a given situation; we won’t hit any shot 100% of the time. Consider an extremely common situation – the...
Balanced Strategy – The Mathy Version
For every probabilistic decision in a non-cooperative game, there exists a balanced (typically mixed) strategy which creates indifference in the opponent – it doesn’t matter how the opponent defends, their equity will be the...
A Common HESBA – The Inside-Out Approach
For many players, the highest equity shot before adjustment when given a short, high ball up the middle is an inside-out forehand approach shot. Most players can hit their inside-out forehand reasonably well, and,...
A Commonly Overused Mixed Strategy
One of the most common situations in which players adopt a suboptimal mixed strategy is doubles return of serve. In many matches, no, you don’t have to hit your serve returns down the line....
Highest Equity Shot Before Adjustment (HESBA)
For every situation from which we have to select a shot, there exists a best option barring strategic adjustment from our opponent. This is our highest equity shot before adjustment, our HESBA. That might...