Taking serve/double fault/holds into account is essential but just doesn’t work with totally new and shitty balls. If the balls were better or people are more used to them there would be more aces and less double faults. And I think that would be great
Of course higher quality equipment would be great. Two things need to be kept in mind: 1. Defense needs to be the primary way to win over serving long term. 2. The sport needs to be grown so that the community can afford high quality things and sustain a business for producing them.
Great data! The rally/hold ratio for STS is 27.4% while CC is 32.0%. Does that feels like this ruleset doesn't actually help defence enough? People weren't familiar with the bigger ball enough and decided to put on more second serve which lead to the data?
I'm curious: what does a rally/hold ratio tell you? I see more value in reviewing the rally/ace ratio; that should tell us if teams can win by playing defense more, less, or the same amount as serving (we of course want teams to win more through defense). For this dataset, we could get a rally to ace (or no return) ratio of: Baseline: 54.5% Experiment: 122.5% And I agree, a lot of people had to adjust to the bigger ball - what I would like to do is continue analyzing games from earlier in the day to see how players adjust over time and how much these distributions changed during the day.
In my opinion, if rally/hold ratio doesn't increase. People eventually will go for higher risk service to at least create bad touches. Then rally to ace ratio will increase again. What I expect from an ideal dataset would be a higher rally/hold ratio which people adjust their strategy to rely more on defence. And it should be rather high in the beginning because I think offense will improve faster than defence. That's why I think we could maybe try a more aggressive ruleset for this. (Just like NHZ first introduced. I don;t have the data, but defence should increase from nearly impossible to possible before it become what we have rught now) rally/hold to me is what actually change the structure of the game toward more defence. I think 2 reasons create high rally/ace ratio from CC are: (1) Not familiar with the ball, so people rather put it on than go for strong serve. (2) People come in the tournament with mindset of this rule will help defence and decide to rely on more on defence. However, if people findout this rule isn't actually easier for defence. Next time the rally/ace ratio may decrease a lot, imo.
![2024 IRF Roundnet World Championships - Men's Indy Finals | Bosak/Cote vs Eisenträger/Siemer [C-VOD]](/img/n.gif)
Thanks for doing this. It is really needed :)
great stuff Ben!
really appreciate all your hard work ben!
🍋
Taking serve/double fault/holds into account is essential but just doesn’t work with totally new and shitty balls.
If the balls were better or people are more used to them there would be more aces and less double faults. And I think that would be great
Of course higher quality equipment would be great. Two things need to be kept in mind:
1. Defense needs to be the primary way to win over serving long term.
2. The sport needs to be grown so that the community can afford high quality things and sustain a business for producing them.
Great data! The rally/hold ratio for STS is 27.4% while CC is 32.0%. Does that feels like this ruleset doesn't actually help defence enough? People weren't familiar with the bigger ball enough and decided to put on more second serve which lead to the data?
I'm curious: what does a rally/hold ratio tell you?
I see more value in reviewing the rally/ace ratio; that should tell us if teams can win by playing defense more, less, or the same amount as serving (we of course want teams to win more through defense).
For this dataset, we could get a rally to ace (or no return) ratio of:
Baseline: 54.5%
Experiment: 122.5%
And I agree, a lot of people had to adjust to the bigger ball - what I would like to do is continue analyzing games from earlier in the day to see how players adjust over time and how much these distributions changed during the day.
In my opinion, if rally/hold ratio doesn't increase. People eventually will go for higher risk service to at least create bad touches. Then rally to ace ratio will increase again.
What I expect from an ideal dataset would be a higher rally/hold ratio which people adjust their strategy to rely more on defence. And it should be rather high in the beginning because I think offense will improve faster than defence. That's why I think we could maybe try a more aggressive ruleset for this. (Just like NHZ first introduced. I don;t have the data, but defence should increase from nearly impossible to possible before it become what we have rught now)
rally/hold to me is what actually change the structure of the game toward more defence. I think 2 reasons create high rally/ace ratio from CC are:
(1) Not familiar with the ball, so people rather put it on than go for strong serve.
(2) People come in the tournament with mindset of this rule will help defence and decide to rely on more on defence.
However, if people findout this rule isn't actually easier for defence. Next time the rally/ace ratio may decrease a lot, imo.