Shot Selection
Foundation of Tactics

Dave Hagler

Here's what seems like a simple question. Which is better, a shot that you can make 100% of the time, or a shot that you can make 30% of the time? That depends on what happens next. If you hit the shot that you can make 100% of the time but you lose 90% of those points, then you win 10% of the total points. If you hit a shot that you can only make 30% of the time but each time you make it you win the point, then you win 30% of the points.

So the answer is that the 30% shot is actually the better shot. It's the shot that gives you a better chance to actually win more points, in a specific situation.

The Hard Part

The hard part is knowing what shots yield what outcomes in what circumstances against what opponents. The reality is that it's never cut and dried. That's why so few players are really good match players. They don't have an intuitive feel for what the probabilities of various situations really are, given all the variables on both sides of the net.

Here's an example. Let's say you are in a crosscourt forehand rally, and the guy is hurting you, pushing you back and wide. You try to get back to even by going crosscourt deeper and higher, but he keeps stepping in and picking up your ball and pushing you further out of court. Now you're a few feet behind the baseline and out in the alley. What do you do?

You can feel that if you hit one more crosscourt, you are dead. The guy is going to step up, drill it down the line and you won't get to the ball. You could try looping the ball deep down the line, but you can feel that you'll never cover his crosscourt backhand, plus he can also go behind you while you are scrambling to cover.

Those are your 100% shot choices, the shots you know you can make. You know you can make either one, but you also know you're almost certain to lose the point either way if you do. The 30% shot in this case is a hard, go for broke running down the line forehand.

So which is really the percentage play? If you play the "safe" shot, you are going to win 1 point out of ten. But if you play the more dangerous shot, you will 3 points. Suddenly the "riskier" down the line shot looks like the percentage play, because on balance, it is going to yield more points.

And it's not just this one scenario with forehand crosscourts that have these kinds of outcomes. There are many other similar situations where you face similar choices. "High percentage" shots where you are likely to lose the point, versus "low percentage" shots, where you are likely to win--if you actually make the shot.

Let's say over the course of a 3 set match, you're in one of these situations 10 times per set. Let's say that in each case you try that 30% shot. So that's a total of 30 low percentage attempts in the match. If you make 30% of these attempts, then you win 9 points. If you choose the safe shot, and win 10% of the points that 3 points. The difference is 6 more points for you in three sets.

If you look at the articles in the strategy section on statistics, you'll see that 6 points is often enough to make the difference in a close match. So even though you might miss a certain shot 7 out of every 10 times, that shot may still be creating the point margin you need to win. That may sound surprising, but when you think about it, it also makes perfect sense.

The deeper problem here is accurately recognizing the situation and assessing the probabilities. Consider the crosscourt scenario again, but this time against another player, one without the same weapons. Against this player, the deep crosscourt reply or the loop down the line may be a better play, because you may be able to stay in and work your way back to neutral, or get ahead and go on offense. So how do you decide? The great match players just know the difference.

So let's outline how you can develop this same knowledge and become a great or at least a better match player, by assessing the various situations you will find yourself in more clearly. As a start let's look at all the potential shots in terms of their "desirability." In other words if you could hit any shot you wanted in a given situation what would be that hierarchy of shots?

Interestingly very few players really understand the differences. Yes, everyone recognizes a dramatic winner and most people can spot bad unforced errors. But most of the shots in the game lie somewhere in between.

The shots closer to the top are harder to make, the ones lower on the list easier. Players who make correct choices choose the appropriate level of risk which maximizes the number of points they will win under any scenario.

Now let's relate the shot hierarchy to the three basic situations you can find yourself in any point. On a given ball in a given point, your position can be offensive, defensive, or neutral. The example we started with above was extreme, because there were no good options that allowed the player to stay in the point, forcing the decision to attempt the low percentage winner. In most situations the choices are more complex, but again it comes down to developing an intuitive feel for the percentages.

Offense

When you are on offense your goal is to win the point if possible and keep control of the point if you can't win it outright. At the very least you want to keep putting pressure on your opponent.

So let's say you are hitting inside out forehands to your opponent's backhand. You are getting ahead in the exchange, have moved up close to the baseline and have pushed your opponent deep into the backhand corner. He keeps trying to get the ball crosscourt to your backhand, or to get around the ball himself, but you have him off balance and are able to play the balls consistently deep and/or wide with your inside out forehand.

So what are your options now? You may feel that you can just break down his backhand, so you keep pounding the ball inside out until you generate an error. That's the kind of 100% shot we talked about above. Except now your chances of winning the point with the 100% play are higher than in our first example.

However, hitting that 100% shot in a slightly different circumstance, you may still feel that, even though you are ahead, you aren't that far ahead, and your opponent can still hang in and keep getting the ball back. In this case, he could eventually get the ball over to your backhand side with the possibility of neutralizing your advantage.

In this case, you need to find a way to take advantage of your margin and finish. If the ball is short, or medium depth, and not too wide, you can get around it and hit an inside in winner. If you have good court position, the probability of making the inside in shot is only marginally less than going back inside out. So this attempt is a much better chance than the first 30% scenario above.

But all inside in opportunities are not identical. The percentage goes down on the inside in if you are still moving around the ball to the left when you hit. That percentage might be more like the 30% shot we talked about in the first example. In that case, the low percentage shot was your only real chance. And it was now or never.

But in this case you can wait. You can hit another inside out forehand, still stay ahead, and wait until you are moving to your right or can get set. So this is a great example of the kind of percentage decision we talked about at the top. You get to choose between 100% shots and 30% shots, but the consequences are now reversed. Now the higher percentage shot yields more points in the long run. But you make the decision for the exact same reason--because it gives you the greatest likelihood of winning the most points from the position you are in with the choices you have.

You can go through the exact same type of calculation with other potential offensive shots from your dominant inside out position. Instead of going around the next ball, you can hit a slice approach down the line and go in. Now the calculation comes down to his passing shots and your volley and/overhead.

Or you can consider hitting a surprise drop shot. The calculation here is the quality of your drop shot, the court coverage of your opponent, and his ability to deal with a low short ball. Nadal tried this on match point in Shanghai, but his miscalculated Federer's response on both counts. In both these cases you may have to actually try them in a given match against a given opponent to understand the potential outcomes.

Here's a great example from the pro tour that shows how that calculus can change from one opponent to the next. Former college star Cecil Mamitt is actually 3 -1 lifetime against Max Mirnyi. Max has a career high of #18 in singles and Cecil has a career high of #72.

Cecil told me that he just really loves having a target and that's why he beats Max, because Max comes to the net and Cecil passes him. And to a certain extent I'll buy that. He's also 2- 0 against Mark Woodforde, another accomplished serve and volleyer. So maybe Cecil's game is just ideally suited to play against serve and volley.

But then consider the fact that he is 0--3 against Tim Henman. So is it purely the style match up? Not likely. The more likely answer is that the balance in the exchanges shifts when he plays Henman. Cecil may like targets, but there is a limit to the difficulty of the targets he can hit. Or maybe Tim is a level higher in what he can do with Cecil's returns and/or attempted passes.

Cecil's percentages on his shots shift with the quality of the opponent. Tim Henman covers a first volley that might give Max trouble. Cecil can hit passes that Max can't cover, but Tim can. Against Tim, Cecil has to make his passes from more difficult positions on more difficult balls, or hit two or three balls whereas he hits fewer, easier passes versus Max. So it all varies. What is good enough against Mirnyi may not be good enough against Henman, and this may cause Cecil to try lower percentage shots and make more errors.

Neutral

Your goal in a neutral situation is to gain control of the point. There may be times when you can hit a winner or force an error, but you are simply trying to get your opponent in trouble. If you can't gain control, you at least try to stay neutral, and wait for the opportunity to get ahead.

So let's say you have a one handed backhand and your opponent has a two-handed backhand. You are in a crosscourt backhand rally and the ball your opponent hits is medium deep and about 6 feet inside the sideline. Let's also say he has hit it fairly fast and with moderate topspin.

You have a lot of choices. It's a ball you can definitely hit hard, but should you? If you feel that your one-hander stands up in the exchange, you can drive the ball back cross court with pace and depth. Maybe you feel the straight up power exchange will eventually work to your advantage. You'll be able to push him back or further outside, and this will lead to a short ball that you can get around and hit inside in or inside out for a winner.

But even though you have a ball you can hit, you may feel, or experience against this opponent may show, that this exchange is more to his advantage. What are your other choices?

First, you can hit the ball cross court with a higher trajectory and more depth, hoping to push him back, or get the ball up out of his strike zone. Or you can go the other way. You can slice the ball cross court to get the ball down below his strike zone, especially since this would tend to favor you as a one handed player. Possibly you can force him to let go and hit a one-handed slice himself. Or maybe you can get him wider and out of position.

All these shots fall into the 100% category or close. Or at least they should. To be a complete player you should have all three options on your backhand side: the ability to drive, to roll, and to slice.

To ask our original question, for each of the high percentage strategies above, what percentage of points are you actually winning?

There is another mort aggressive option. This is to drive the ball down the line with pace. The one-handed backhand down the line is one of the most difficult but also most beautiful shots in tennis.

To use another pro example, Gustavo Kuerten was one of the first modern players of fairly recent vintage to negate his opponent's crosscourts (and even big inside out forehands) with big down the line backhands. What made this even more impressive was that he did so from so far behind the baseline it sometimes seemed as if he was playing from another area code.

With his extreme grip, his strike zone was higher than more classical grips, so a hard crosscourt topspin drive was virtually a set up shot for Guga. If you have a more conventional grip, this may not be the case for you. In a previous generation, Elliot Teltscher, who also had a fairly extreme grip, actually tried to work the points to get into position to do the same and drill hard, relatively flat backhand winners down the line.

But regardless of your particular grip, the real question is how good is your one-hander down the line? Can you make it a high percentage of the time when you get a solid, crosscourt rally ball to hit, as in the example we are discussing? On this type of ball, is it closer to a 100% shot, or more like a 30% shot?

The next question is, if you can hit it, and you do hit it, how is your opponent's court coverage? Can you hit some winners, or at least accomplish your goal of moving from neutral to offense? Does your down the line backhand hurt him or pressure his response? Or is it the opposite? By going down the line are you giving your opponent a chance to hit a forehand and the chance to go on offense himself?

High level players, like Kuerten, can hurt their opponent or even finish the point when they get this chance. But as you go down levels, fewer and fewer players can accomplish the same thing. The question really is in a given match against a given player what happens if you hit this shot?

So with all the options we've looked at, the questions to ask yourself is the same. How comfortable and confident am I making this shot? That's something you basically should know coming into any match. Is it the 100% shot, or the 30% shot or somewhere in between?

The second question is what happens when I do hit this shot? If you have played the opponent or seen him play, you may already know the answer or have a good idea. If not, it's something you may be able to sense just from the exchanges you are having. More likely, it is something you will have to test directly in the match at hand.

Defense

Your goal in this situation is to try to get back to neutral. If you can't get back to neutral then your goal is to stay in the point and, at the least, make your opponent hit one more ball. Or, under somewhat extreme circumstances such as the scenario at the top of the article, it may make sense to go for broke and attempt to hit a winner.

Let's say in the neutral scenario we just looked at, a crosscourt backhand exchange, you chose to hit the loop ball back with a higher trajectory. Let's say you don't get the ball as deep or as high as you hoped. Your opponent now hits a crosscourt shot harder and deeper and pushes you further back. Now you are on defense. The danger is that you will make an error or give him a ball he can finish.

One option is to try to hit another looper, this time a deeper higher ball, the way you imagined the first shot. Another is to float a deep high cross court slice that will take away his pace and possibly frustrate him as well. In either case you hope he won't be able to attack the next ball as aggressively. It's also possible that he will get anxious since you are neutralizing his attack, overhit the next ball, and make an error.

A different approach that is more aggressive is to attempt to take the ball early. Step in and hit a half-volley drive cross court with pace. This can blunt your opponent's ability to continue the attack. Depending on how well you hit it, he may have to try to neutralize your ball and lose the advantage. Or he may be overeager and overhit and donate the point with an error.

The most aggressive choice is to again take the ball early, but instead of going crosscourt, rip it down the line. This is the same option you had with the netural ball, but the degree of difficulty is now significantly higher.

Another defensive option is to hit that high looping spin ball, but to hit it down the line instead of crosscourt. The idea here is to get off that backhand to backhand diagonal, and try to force your opponent to hit a crosscourt forehand. The question here is whether the ball is high enough or deep enough and/or heavy enough to keep him from hurting you crosscourt with his forehand. If he can handle the ball and can step in, pick it up and rip it, you may find yourself in worse trouble than where you started.

On the other hand, you may find that the time you buy by putting the ball up is enough to recover to your forehand side. Now you are on a different exchange, forehand to forehand.

This technique can also be used to neturalize an inside out attacking game. When I first saw Jim Courier play, I recognized that he had developed an extreme court positioning strategy, based on, or at least similar to, table tennis.

In table tennis, players try to get around the backhand corner of the table, and play literally every ball with the inside out or inside in forehand. Courier applied this strategy to tennis and was able to dominate the tour on clay, winning the French Open twice and even reaching the final at Wimbledon.

But players eventually discovered that as fearsome as his forehand was, it wasn't nearly as dangerous on the deuce diagonal. So by looping down the line, they forced Jim to move across the court and hit his forehand from a less favorable position. This had the added advantage of opening up his backhand side, and forcing him to hit more backhands on the run, which was a relative weakness in his game.

It's a great example of how the exchanges and patterns are all relative. What makes this so interesting is there again is no definitive answer. The "best" shot will vary from opponent to opponent, from day to day and even from point to point. Geometry is obviously a big part of it, but execution, pace, and court movement are all factors that can tip the outcome of the exchange.

Great players have a natural understanding of the results of their shots before they hit them. Even though they may not be consciously aware, the choices they make indicate cognizance of the probable results of each option. They seem to know when that 30% shot is their best option.

There is no perfect choice -- it depends on what you can do, the skill level and individual strengths and weaknesses of your opponent. The specific skills of each player create match-ups, and match-ups are one thing that makes the game so fascinating to play and to watch. It is a matter of being able to force your opponent into situations that he does not like (or that you do) with enough frequency that you can control the match physically and psychologically.