Whether you take the glass half full or half empty approach, the minute you include forced errors, the visuals tell a slightly different story. In some sense, one of these may be like IBM’s take on something called the aggressive ratio — a formula that looks at a player’s ability to hit winners and force their opponents to commit an error.

In this case, it is INDUCED forced errors so really they winners of the match for ATP and WTA cause their opponents to make 13 or 11 errors, respectively.

There is no difference if you consider averages between the ATP and WTA. The only two obvious statements I can make: there are more errors than winners and the match winner makes less mistakes (duh). You can see these numbers for different years with Charles Allen’s tool here.

We can start with the neutral points — the points that represent most of the chess game right before you arrive at check [or checkmate].

Neutral points are as important as point enders. Do not disregard them!

For any color blind readers, I made the dots that represent losses bigger in size so you can distinguish! Anything less than 1 means there were more neutral points lost than won so this initial result makes sense.

After briefly exploring the neutral points, I want to reintroduce something called a dominant shot. You may remember this from Tennis Note #8: Rafa in Paris, in which I illustrated the importance of Rafa’s down the line forehand at Roland Garros. I also used this methodology in Tennis Note #22: A Visual History of Serena Williams as well, to illustrate the shot dominance of Serena Williams. The equation is solely based on the player and does not count forced errors at the hand of their opponent. However, total shots on each side includes not just point enders but neutral points. This way, the dominant shot is normalized and easy to compare between the variety of shot selection. Below is a simplistic analysis for Djokovic, not considering shot selection.