My first big study was https://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/ind...om-1877-to-2020-with-a-regular-update.685425/. Now I continue with other types of studies.
The theme “performance by surface” has been always interesting to the tennis fans. The discussions go often with the numbers of slam titles and some other selectively chosen data. More interesting for me is the whole performance of the players on every surface.
Types of surfaces
Basically I split the surfaces into 4 categories:
Clay – includes clay outdoor and indoor;
Grass;
Hard outdoor – includes all hard outdoor surfaces (cement, wood, carpet and any other artificial hard surfaces)
Hard indoor - includes all hard indoor surfaces (wood, carpet, canvas and any other artificial hard surfaces)
Scope
The study covers the players from 1877 to current which have at least 1 title in their careers.
The study covers the tournaments, tours and one-night matches from 1877 to current (after Miami 2021). The tournaments include Davis cup, Nations cup, World team cup and Kramer cup.
Limits
1. Excluded from the number of titles and number of matches are the challengers, the futures and the tournaments with a scrappy competition (especially in the pre-open era). This is made intentionally to place all players on equal terms due to the different functionality, specificity and level of competitiveness of the different eras and every single year.
2. Only the players with at least 100 wins and at least 120 matches played per surface participate in the final rankings by surfaces. Only 1 exception of this rule is made – Novak Djokovic is included in the “grass” section with 95 wins and 113 total matches played on grass. He has the incredible win/loss ratio of 84.1% but has only 6 titles and practically does not affect the rankings.
This criterion has been implied because they are too many players with a limited play on a specific surface and their data distort the chief indicators.
Chief indicators
After a long consideration and analyses of the best possible methods of evaluating the surface’ performance I focused on the following indicators:
1. Number of wins per surface – shows the player’s preference and consistency on a surface;
2. Win/loss (W/L) ratio per surface – shows the level of dominance on a surface;
3. Number of titles per surface – shows the level of efficiency of reaching the target;
Methodology of evaluating the performance by surface
All the players are ranked on each of the three indicators for each surface in descending order. The total ranking is summed by the rankings of the 3 indicators and sorted in ascending order.
Example – a player is ranked 9th by w/l, 6th by wins and 10th by titles. His total ranking is 25 which compared to other players’ total rankings means for example 7th place in total rank.
Players with equal number of wins or equal number of titles get the same ranking for this indicator.
Presentation
For the best viewing options I will present the top 10 players of each indicator and the total rank’s top 10 players – 4 tables in total.
As they are too many tables (16 for all surfaces) I think it’s better that every surface will be presented in a different thread indicated in the thread’s title.
So, let’s start. First reviewed surface is clay. It seemed from the survey that clay was the mostly used surface in the whole history. 40.1% of the tournaments were on clay.
The theme “performance by surface” has been always interesting to the tennis fans. The discussions go often with the numbers of slam titles and some other selectively chosen data. More interesting for me is the whole performance of the players on every surface.
Types of surfaces
Basically I split the surfaces into 4 categories:
Clay – includes clay outdoor and indoor;
Grass;
Hard outdoor – includes all hard outdoor surfaces (cement, wood, carpet and any other artificial hard surfaces)
Hard indoor - includes all hard indoor surfaces (wood, carpet, canvas and any other artificial hard surfaces)
Scope
The study covers the players from 1877 to current which have at least 1 title in their careers.
The study covers the tournaments, tours and one-night matches from 1877 to current (after Miami 2021). The tournaments include Davis cup, Nations cup, World team cup and Kramer cup.
Limits
1. Excluded from the number of titles and number of matches are the challengers, the futures and the tournaments with a scrappy competition (especially in the pre-open era). This is made intentionally to place all players on equal terms due to the different functionality, specificity and level of competitiveness of the different eras and every single year.
2. Only the players with at least 100 wins and at least 120 matches played per surface participate in the final rankings by surfaces. Only 1 exception of this rule is made – Novak Djokovic is included in the “grass” section with 95 wins and 113 total matches played on grass. He has the incredible win/loss ratio of 84.1% but has only 6 titles and practically does not affect the rankings.
This criterion has been implied because they are too many players with a limited play on a specific surface and their data distort the chief indicators.
Chief indicators
After a long consideration and analyses of the best possible methods of evaluating the surface’ performance I focused on the following indicators:
1. Number of wins per surface – shows the player’s preference and consistency on a surface;
2. Win/loss (W/L) ratio per surface – shows the level of dominance on a surface;
3. Number of titles per surface – shows the level of efficiency of reaching the target;
Methodology of evaluating the performance by surface
All the players are ranked on each of the three indicators for each surface in descending order. The total ranking is summed by the rankings of the 3 indicators and sorted in ascending order.
Example – a player is ranked 9th by w/l, 6th by wins and 10th by titles. His total ranking is 25 which compared to other players’ total rankings means for example 7th place in total rank.
Players with equal number of wins or equal number of titles get the same ranking for this indicator.
Presentation
For the best viewing options I will present the top 10 players of each indicator and the total rank’s top 10 players – 4 tables in total.
As they are too many tables (16 for all surfaces) I think it’s better that every surface will be presented in a different thread indicated in the thread’s title.
So, let’s start. First reviewed surface is clay. It seemed from the survey that clay was the mostly used surface in the whole history. 40.1% of the tournaments were on clay.
Last edited: