Table Tennis Data

Hello Everybody,

I now need to update my table tennis research progress; although this time it will be with a much shorter post.

Basically, I received my DVDs of the 2010 World Table Tennis Championship (WTTC) last week and started watching some of the matches to record data. Much like Dr. Wooders did in his “Minimax Play at Wimbledon” paper, I am recording direction of serve, serve mixture, points won with certain serve, win rates, and eventually, Pearson statistics (chi-squared), and P-Values.

However, it will probably take me another week or so to record enough data such that I have good results. So far, I am actually finding that table tennis players are NOT playing according to minimax (assuming P-values that do not indicate rejection of data). The players have served more often to the left than the right even though the win rate for serving to the left is much less than for serving to the rate. This is even true when controlling for Deuce and Ad courts. However, this is through only about a quarter of the data collection that I need to do, so those results could change fairly quickly. There also is a chance that I have to watch more matches than I ordered, because even though the DVDs contain enough matches for good results, the matches are a select few compared to all the matches that took place in the tournament. The matches chosen by the producer also seem to show a slight bias toward matches involving the Chinese team (champion), and German team (runner-up)

So far, I have been working the library at the University of Arizona because it is a quiet workspace. I have spent a lot of time at the library watching the DVDs on my laptop and then recording data from them. This is more of an independent research project, because I am only seeing Dr. Wooders for guidance (at least so far) on how to conduct my research project (although the ideas for the project definitely derive from his paper).

I’ll probably post again sometime soon as to how the data is turning out.

Jayanth (Juanito6561)