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Remember that time in 2015 when the world’s top-ranked player, Novak Djokovic lost to unranked Australian Chris Letcher? You don’t. Well it could’ve happened. In doing some research on the 2015 season, I decided to jump down the wormhole of who would have the worst possible indirect win over Djokovic. These types of path or graph theory problems are fun to explore. What is the simplest, longest past over a certain player? And along the way, can we find the ‘worst’ or lowest-ranked player… ...

People have always compared six-man football to a computer game. With its wild scores and fast-paced style, six-man football can be just as exciting, if not more so. So what if you played the entire six-man season on your Xbox? That’s why I decided to use the TrueSkill Ranking System created by Microsoft Research for Xbox Live games and apply it to the season. Microsoft uses this algorithm to track the skill of gamers in order to place them in competitive matches. On the Microsoft Research website it explains that the ranking system is characterized by two attributes: a players average skill level (ranking) and the degree of uncertainty in the gamer’s skill (this would be the variation in the players level). If you would like to read more, it can be found at the Microsoft Research website, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/ ...

As we have now moved into August and it is officially the Dog Days of Summer, it is time to do a quick review of July’s Best and Worst performances on the ITF Futures Circuit. First we need to define July. I have defined July as being any tournament played in July, specifically the week of 29 June-05 July through last week, 27 July-02 August. Now on to the Winners… Here’s a list of the multi-tournament winners for the month. ...

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a new website, www.thestringtheory.net, dedicated to professional tennis analytics. The site will primarily focus on the lower ITF Circuits to begin with. I have started collecting data and posted a brief article highlighting the first half of the 2015 season. The website also boasts a Twitter account, @th3str1ngth30ry, which for the time being mostly tweets from a bot I built. The bot ‘visits’ the ITF live scoreboard every 24 minutes, sees if any matches are done and tweets out any results. It was quite a cool little project since they try to hide their data inside Flash, but with a little help, I managed to get it figured out. The program is not 100% stable, as the Java-based driver it uses seems to have some issues every once in awhile. ...

I decided it would be good to create some awards or recognition (good and bad) for the first half of the year on the Men’s ITF Pro Circuit. I am defining the first half of the year as being from January 1, 2015 to the finals played on July 5, 2015. Most of these will be straight descriptive lists or players that stand out. I hope to do a deeper dive and analysis once I get everything going. In the future, I intend to include the women’s side and also do awards monthly. ...

Yes, I built a Twitter bot. My bot tweets random, nonsensical wine reviews (you can find it here @WineSnobBot). of fresh peaches, this low-alcohol effort is further bolstered by sémillon, this is now past its peak. I know what you are all asking – WHY? I have been working recently on a variety of projects. One of them included getting a new server running at the house to mine data and run various other automated scripts. As usual, these projects get bigger and bigger and I haven’t been able get much out the door. ...

Writer’s Note: I have added a Tableau Public version of the data used here that is very interactive. Follow this link With Austin Krajicek reaching a career-high #121 in the world, I decided this was a good time start looking into the current top-level Americans and where we stand. Let me start by saying I am just stunned by the fact that Austin has surpassed Ryan Harrison in the rankings. I am not sure how long this will last, but Lefty has really outperformed ‘my’ expectations. Congratulations to him. I always thought his left-handed, slicing game was unique. When he is serving well, he is a tough out. ...

With the announcement of Shaka Smart as Texas’ new men’s basketball coach coming as I write this, I thought I would put a few keystrokes down on how the two coaches teams have fared since 2009, when Shaka took over at VCU. Since I wrote about luck (Pythagorean Luck) earlier in the week, let’s start there. I also want to point out that all of these number utilize regular season data. ...

This article is by no means intended to give a full picture of Rick Barnes’ tenure at Texas, but rather point out why he may have needed to go. I am a Rick Barnes fan and appreciate everything he did for Longhorn basketball, but I also recognize that, in the immortal words of Dr. Seuss’ ‘Marvin K. Mooney’, it was time for Rick to, “Go, Go, Go.” The concept of Pythagorean Luck is derived from the difference between a team’s Pythagorean Winning Percentage (invented for baseball by the legendary Bill James) and their actual winning percentage. In layman’s terms, this is a difference between their expected winning percentage (based on actual offensive and defensive production) and their actual winning percentage. ...

I have been combing through lots and lots of data, as I prepare my own entry to the Kaggle Machine Learning March Mania Contest again this year. I won’t go into how I am managing my entry right now, as the competition is obviously still open, but I thought I would share some of the insights I have accumulated along the way. First off, you need to have a strategy. You can be the guy with the chalk bracket or the batshit-crazy-upset-dude, but we all know somewhere in the middle is probably where you need to go… just enough chalk, just enough upsets. ...