Grandpa - gone wild!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Comments

[Veglia]

This is for whatever reason really, really funny

[Bento]

Oh my god, what a genius.

[Alpha]

Terrific match between Federer and Medvedev. Roger looking good l.

[Alpha]

Novak is looking like he did 2 years ago, he's found his movement and the depth of shot. And, if anything, he looks even more intense.

My guess is he will end the year as #1 and win the WTF. The it's the AO where he will be the favorite. If he wins that, then wait to see how the clay court season goes.

Of course he could lose to Zverev tomorrow too.

TP, let's have a wall fo fame please. Hvaen't had one for a while. Who's going to be the first guy, who is currently less than 30 years old, to win a slam. Name the guy and the slam. Tie break: name the opponent (can change name if opponent falls in your winner's half of draw)

[Alpha]

Anybodyvwatching? What a match berween l Federer and Nishikori. Crazy attacking tennis by both.

[Gary Moser]

[ From Peter Stebbings article posted on Yahoo! Sports ]

"Touted as a potential future multiple Grand Slam winner,
fourth seed Zverev eased past Kyle Edmund to reach his first Shanghai semi-final."

MULTIPLE, by strict definition, means MORE THAN ONE.

So...as few as...2?

I mean, Yevgeny Kafelnikov won 2 Slams in the Sampras & Agassi [ 14 & 8 ] era.

Ummm...YAWN?!?!?

[sperry]

I've only been able to watch Novak in highlights... which gives a really distorted view of his overall level. He started a bit slow, but by the second set, he looked to me to be as strong as ever. RE: "wait to see how the clay court season goes." In his magical 2015, he played three clay court tourneys. Won Rome, won Monte Carlo, beat Nadal in the in the quarters at the FO, and lost in the final to Stan, (who looked like he could have beaten Bob and Mike Bryan that day). He can play on clay.

[Bettyjane]

I can't believe the backhand. I'm back in Australian Open of 2017. Whoo hoooo.

[Alpha]

I think it's a bit too aggressive.He's taking much more risk than he should if he wants to win consistently. We'll see.

[Alpha]

Right now, he isn't even multiple quarter finalist.

As for the article, yes, there is the strict literal interpretation. There is also another way to look at it, trying to undersatnd what author is trying to convey. I'm guessing stuff like "raining cats and dogs" got you very confused when you didn't see any cats or dogs.

[nick]

Heading is right, Grandpa gone wild. His way of partying. Should he reach that stage may be good for a set against Novak's consistency

[Gary Moser]

Some frogs once --- but then remembered that I was just watching a movie.

[Alpha]

Haha!

[Alpha]

Novak is doing what Novak does better than anybody — precision deep shots time after time after time
Death by choking. Looking awesome.

Firmly the AO favourite now. If he goes on to hold all 4 slams for a second time, this time at age 32, does he become the GOAT?

[Alpha]

That’s how it is now. Unfortunately.

[sperry]

Again, a highlights only watch. Novak looks very, very strong. Without having lots of data to work with, my hunch is that Federer takes a lot more shots then he used to when he isn't perfectly balanced. Lost a step, sure. But what I see (not saying it's there) is a lack of intensity... or did he always look like that? Used to be when he got behind, he simply did what he had to do to get ahead. Now it looks like he's not sure he can win. Or doesn't care? It's October... mentally/physically exhausted? That's what it looked like today, anyway.

[sperry]

I think even if he won the calendar slam next year, I still would have to look hard at GOAT. 18 isn't 20, and that, in my eyes, is a huge stat. BOAT? Yeah... he already is, in my eyes. I am still working on that "scoring by competition instead of tournament" idea. I finished one player/one year last night. (Nadal 2017) I think the model works. Here is how I did it: I copied/pasted the ranking points of the top 16 players... once for each month. I then normalized (is that the right word?) them. So the #1 player got 10,000 points, and then the other 15 players got a percentage of the top player's score, based, of course, on their points. So... different numbers but exactly the same relationship between the numbers. Then I listed all Nadal's 2017 tournaments and listed the ranking points of the 16 players who were in that specific tournament. (The 2017 AO had all 16, Barcelona only had 1, 5, 9, 10.) Then I added those numbers to get a tournament total. (AO 59,521, Barcelona 20,323) Then I figured out the POSSIBLE points (if all 16 played...AO: 59,521, Barcelona 62,894) and divided total possible into actual... AO: 1.0, Barcelona .323. Then I multiplied by 1000 and the AO gets 1000 and Barcelona gets 323. I used the ATP's percentages to award points: Winner of the USO gets 1000 points, Barcelona winner gets 323. Finalist for the AO gets 600, Barcelona 194... like that. You think that works?

[Alpha]

Wow1 Lots of work and interesting stuff.

My issue remains the same as before. Assume Rafa is #1 at 1000 points, Roger #2 at 900 points etc. Rafa enters Barcelona, it has 323 points. Assume Roger doesn't play. Now substitute Rafa with Roger but keep every other player the same. Points for winning Barcelona will drop. That means if Roger wins it, with exactly the same competition as Rafa would have, he gets fewer points. Effectively, Rafa gets rewarded for playing yourself, which of course he can't do. Or am I missing something? .

[sperry]

You are right, mostly. When I started doing this, I wanted to use it as a tool to evaluate the amount of competition players faced. When I started looking at the scores I was getting for tournaments, I found it even more interesting. (In 2015, Indian Wells, Shanghai, and Paris all had significantly higher competition than the AO. Another year (using a slightly different method) I had a GS on top, then 4 Masters before the next slam.) Anyway... if used strictly as a tool to evaluate strength of the draw, then your argument seems to me (if I'm understanding it right) irrelevant. But... yeah... you are right. Swap in #2 for #1, and points go down and therefore with exactly the same draw (outside of that one switch), the #2 couldn't get as many points. Not fair. Let me run some numbers, I'll let you know the impact on my next post. On the other hand, look at the ATP system. You've got a Masters with all 16 of the top seeds worth 1000 points, and a slam missing 2, 4, 5, 10, and 11 (USO in 2017) worth 2000? (In fact, using my numbers, the USO was 10th out of 18 tournaments I looked at that year.) I'll take my flaw any day. By the way, I tried fixing your problem by dropping the player I was evaluating out of the draw (he never played himself, so it seemed possible) but it got messy. I think it's possible but not with my resources and IQ.

[sperry]

Turns out 7 of the tournaments I looked at in 2015 and 2017 had only one of the two top players show up, so it was easy to run pretty real numbers. Sample low competition: Doha went from 356 to 332. Medium competition: Acapulco went from 530 to 499. Medium high competition: USO went from 662 to 632. All fell between 3% and 6%. EXCEPT... Turns out in April of 17, there was about a 3000 point spread between #1 and #2, so Barcelona went from 323 to 274. 15%, but that would be rare. (Unless Roger or Novak were in God-mode.) Oh... this all reminds me... a month or so ago, I was working on a different method, and used 2015. (Was curious about Novak's monster year.) I noticed a tournament near the beginning of the year had roughly the same competition as one at the end, and Novak got something like 40% fewer points for winning. I looked into it... At the beginning of 2015, the #1 to #2 spread was 1700. At the end, the spread was an insane 7600. What was happening, of course, was #'s 2, 3, and 4 were battling it out for the crumbs that Novak left. Since my way of scoring was to award points by using the opponent's ranking points, Novak, by hogging all the points, was killing his own chances of collecting lots of points because nobody else was getting any.