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...
Serve is Out = Great Return, Explained
Your opponent hits their serve long. “Out,” you say, as you swing at the ball anyway. Lo and behold, the shot you produce on this return, a return that, by all accounts, should be...
Your Brain Will Trick You (Into Missing)
Sometimes, it’s amazing now “lucky” Novak Djokovic gets. He hits line after line without missing, appearing to aim to targets not even 6-inches wide, and yet never hitting the ball out. But what’s really...
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...
Is “Coach-You” a Terrible Match Coach?
We’ve already discussed how to play better in matches twice before. Here are those two articles, if you’re interested: Vision Will Transform Your Match Play Great In Practice, Bad in Matches Today, we’re going...
Vision Will Transform Your Match Play
Vision might be the single most underrated tool in every tennis player’s toolbox. Sure, every coach tells their students to “watch the ball,” but what does that really mean? And why is it that...
Great In Practice, Bad in Matches
Why is it that so many players feel like they play great in practice, and yet can’t produce that same level of tennis in matches? In two words: Mental Resources. In a match situation,...
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...