Love All
What this is all about.
“This game starts with love-all”, said the organiser in the inaugural speech of a tournament I played when I was 11. It isn’t relevant here, but it sounds profound.
Some time in 2015, Jeff Sackmann (of TennisAbtract fame) started uploading his tennis datasets to Github. This treasure trove of meticulously gathered data suddenly allowed fans such as me to attempt to answer some questions for ourselves, in the fashion that Sackmann does himself on his blog.
While initial forays were dictated by Quora A2As, I eventually started coming upon fairly interesting results of my own. This publication is my attempt to share some of those results.
The idea is to pick up a ‘question’, preferably a subjective one, answer it with numbers, and finally try to justify the answer, if necessary. Additionally, for anyone interested, I’ll post the final query used to find the answer on an accompanying GitHub repo.
The Sackmann databases are public, and can be set up on your device fairly easily. My own fork has a bunch of setup scripts to aid you. If you’d like to try it, and need help getting started, please get in touch. There are precious few things in the world I would enjoy more than helping someone do this.
The image used in the header of this publication should reflect the nearest Grand Slam, and is taken from Josh Arcurio’s work here. License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
