Winning the All Important First Game

I'm sure most of would guess that the player who wins the first game has an increased probably of winning the match. That should come to us as no great surprise. But let's dive into just how much that advantage is. Perhaps after seeing the following stats, we all can have a greater appreciation in making sure we are ready and completely focused the moment a match starts at 0-0 vs "warming up" or "getting into our groove". I know I have been guilty of this as much as anybody so it is my hope that this to serves as a reminder to myself just as much as it might to you reading this.

I went through ITTF's page to review the statistics from the last 2013 World Table Tennis Championship held in Paris last summer. The WTTC along with the Olympics is the biggest tournament table tennis has to offer. It is what top players aspire to win someday. Needless to say, it is a big tournament and the sample size is big enough for us to get some interesting, reliable data.

I looked at the results from the Men's Singles. In that tournament, 123 matches were played with the winner taking the best 4 out of 7 games.

Of those 123 matches, the winner took game one 92 times!

123 matches (stats from winners)

• 92 won game 1 in the best 4 of 7 and went into win the match = 74.7%
• In short, if you take game 1 in the best of 7 series, you have a 74.7% chance to win. If you lose that first game, you're chances of winning gown down to 25.2%.

That's pretty substantial. Here where I play locally, tournaments are held with a best 3 out of 5 game format thus making game 1 even more important. There is even less room for error and less time to mount a comeback should you lose that first game.

Lets play Devils Advocate for a moment and purpose the following argument.

"Steve come on. Those stats are skewed because all the 4-0 sweeps in the tournament. Sometimes a player is far superior and is going to win regardless. It doesn't matter if they won the first game or not. You knew Xu Xin was the number 1 seed was going to cruise through several players below his level."

While those games still count, I would say this is fair. After all, Xu Xin did have 4 matches where he won 4-0 padding the "won game 1" stat.

Let's then remove all the 4-0 games where one could argue a player is far superior to the other. Pretend they didn't exist. Never happened. Certainly the other closer matches would be more even correct? Well, not so much.

Of those 123 matches minus the 4-0 sweeps, you are left with 92 total matches where at least each player won a game. How did the numbers stack up then?

92 matches (stats from winners who lost at least one game in the match)

• 61 won game 1 in the best 4 of 7 and went into win the match = 66.3%
• So that number dipped from 74.7% to 66.3% in what you might consider more even matches. Should you lose game 1, what are your chances of still winning the match? 33.6%.

As you can see no matter which way you slice it, your chances of winning the match after taking game 1 increase dramatically. Of course this is from the 2013 WTTC. Next time you play, record your own scores from your matches. Report them back here in the comments. I think you will find similar results.