Alcarize Your Dropshot
In the Barcelona 2023 final, Carlos Alcaraz hit nine drop shot winners against Stefanos Tsitsipas. Nine. In two sets. How is Carlos Alcaraz so unbelievably lethal with this shot, when most on the tour...
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...
Battle of the Girls who ATTACK
We’ve talked before about how, in singles tennis, shots that you can execute at less than 80% are essentially useless – you’ll lose too many points from missing those shots for whatever small offensive...
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...
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...
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....