The Magic and Mystery of Birds by Noah Strycker

Author:Noah Strycker [Strycker, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285642805
Published: 2014-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

WE’LL COME BACK TO CHICKENS. But first we have to talk about tennis for a moment.

Every year in November, the world’s top eight male tennis players convene for a high-stakes tournament called the World Tour Finals, an end-of-the-year championship that traditionally caps each season’s grueling ten-month playing schedule. Since 1970, the event has rotated between fifteen different cities and it’s been played on carpet, grass, and hard courts—both indoors and outdoors. It’s been won by the greatest players of all time (Roger Federer, Pete Sampras) and one or two guys you’ve probably never heard of (Manuel Orantes, Michael Stich). Through it all, an unusual format has endured at the tournament.

Most tennis tournaments are played with classic single-elimination draws in which if you lose one match, you’re out. Half of the players advance in each round until only one is left standing. Single elimination is straightforward, brutal, and occasionally unpredictable; if someone has one bad day, that’s it. The format is also efficient at picking winners. In a field of 128 players, one needs to survive only seven matches to win the tournament.

But the World Tour Finals, with just eight players in the draw, is a different sort of event. Rarely do the top tennis stars get the opportunity to play just each other, and everybody relishes these high-profile matchups. Tournament organizers settled on a partial round-robin format instead of the usual single-elimination strategy. The field is divided into two groups of four. Within those groups, everyone plays everyone else, then the top two from each group advance to the semifinals, which sets up a traditional final.

In a sport like tennis, with relatively stable rankings and the purest talent at the top, the round-robin format seems to permit fewer flukes. If a good player has a bad day, he gets a second chance. A quick glance at the list of World Tour Finals champions from the past forty years confirms this idea; Roger Federer has won the event six times, Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl five times each.

These round-robins can also get confusing, though. In 2006, three players in one of the groups—Andy Roddick, Ivan Ljubičić, and David Nalbandian—had each won one match, with a somewhat circular result: Roddick beat Ljubičić, who beat Nalbandian, who beat Roddick. The three-way tie was broken by advancing the player who had won the most sets (Nalbandian), but the denouement was unsatisfying.

Though round-robin tournaments may appear to result in true rankings, the reality is that they often don’t.

Things did not go smoothly in 2007, for example, when the men’s professional tennis organization decided to try the round-robin format at several other events. At a Las Vegas tournament that year, American defending champion James Blake was playing Argentinian Juan Martín del Potro for a slot in the quarterfinals when del Potro, who wasn’t feeling well, called it quits halfway through the second set. Blake had built a commanding lead, and, had he finished the match, would have advanced easily. But because the match was stopped, he didn’t qualify for the quarterfinals.

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