Company
Date Published
Author
Mark Needham
Word count
2091
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The 2025 Roland Garros final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz highlighted the fine margins in tennis, as Sinner, despite being on the brink of victory with three championship points, ultimately lost the match. This scenario was reminiscent of a previous analysis of Alcaraz's performance at Wimbledon, which suggested he was never truly in danger of losing his first-round match, despite the game extending to five sets. The analysis used ClickHouse, a database management system, to build a function that computes how many points a player needs to win the game, illustrating the complexity of tennis scoring. The author initially faced challenges with AI coding assistants in understanding tennis's unique scoring system, leading to the choice of ClickHouse for the analysis. The study involved creating tests for user-defined functions and storing tennis data in ClickHouse to determine players' proximity to victory. The project culminated in a Streamlit and plot.ly application to visualize match data, underscoring the technical and analytical effort involved in understanding tennis matches through data.