What causes streakiness in dubs?

[Maui19]

I have a doubles partner that I play with fairly regularly. We are laughingly streaky. We will run off nine, ten, eleven games in a row almost every time we play. It's not that we are killing people. Sometimes we are getting killed (say 0-4, 1-5) in a match, then we go on to win games in bunches. Even then, it isn't like we are overpowering anyone. I've noticed that we seem to win a lot of games where we are down love-30 or love-40. We also don't change strategy much (although I don't think it takes much of a change in strategy to turn things around sometimes).

I know in singles you can get on a roll when you start feeling good about your strokes, but dubs is a different animal IMO.

So what causes this kind of streakiness?

[OrangePower]

Eh, I beg to differ re dubs vs singles. I can personally attest to absurdly streaky singles play also.

I think it comes down to inconsistent execution, in both singles and dubs. Let's face it, at the rec level, on any given shot and point, there is some probability we are going to mess up. Sometimes we go on a 'lucky' streak, where we generally avoid messing up for a few points and games, and then sometimes the opposite. Like flipping a coin - flip a coin enough times, and you'll have streaks of heads and streaks of tails.

Of course playing style has something to do with it. Conservative players tend to make less errors and therefore are less prone to streaks, unless the streak is a result of the opponent's play. Aggressive players are great at making their own streaks!

[LuckyR]

Orangepower is on the trail of the answer. Because doubles involves two players, there will be an increased chance of average play (when "better" and "worse" cancel each other out) but no one keeps track of average play. The other thing is that crazy good (better/better) and crazy bad (worse/worse) play will also be accentuated, which folks do tend to remember.