Okay, so today I decided to mess around with predicting Sloane Stephens’ matches. It’s something I’ve been curious about for a while, so I figured, why not give it a shot?
Getting Started
First, I dug around for some data. I needed match stats, you know? Like, win/loss records, head-to-head stuff against different players, performance on different court surfaces (hard, clay, grass – the whole shebang). I spent a good chunk of time just gathering all this information, and oh boy it took more time than I wanted.
Building Something (Sort Of)
Next, I tried to put this all together in a way that made sense. I’m no data scientist, so I kept it pretty basic. I mainly focused on her recent performance, her opponent’s stats, and the type of tournament. Also a litte bit on their history playing against each other.
- Recent Form: How has Sloane been playing lately? Winning a lot, or struggling?
- Opponent Stats: Is her opponent ranked higher or lower? What’s their win/loss record like?
- Tournament Type: Is it a Grand Slam, a smaller tournament, or what?
- Head-to-Head: What happend before when two players played each other?
Making a Prediction
After looking at all the data, I made my prediction. I’m not gonna lie, it felt a little like throwing a dart at a board, but I tried to be logical about it. I basically weighed each factor and came up with a “guess” for whether she’d win or lose. It’s really hard to be truly confident, there are so many things that can happen in a tennis match!
The Result
For this test it work well. I predicted right this time, ha! But, I need to test this out on a bunch more matches to see if my “system” actually works. It’s all very rough, but it was fun to try! Might need more time to dig in and try more.
