MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4416284783 · doi:10.1177/22150218251388751

Making tennis fairer: The grand tiebreak <sup/>

2025· article· en· W4416284783 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Sports Analytics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicSports Analytics and Performance
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCompetition (biology)Set (abstract data type)IncentiveTournamentGame of chanceOutcome (game theory)Strategy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Tennis, like other games and sports, is governed by rules, including the rules that determine the winner of points, games, sets, and matches. If the two players are equally skilled, each has an equal chance of winning matches. However, the player who wins the most games may not be the player who wins the match. A notable example was the 2019 men's Wimbledon final between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. In this paper, we study both theoretically and empirically the probability of such discrepancies occurring, using data from 50,000 Grand Slam matches. We argue that this discrepancy, when it occurs, should be resolved by a Grand Tiebreak (GT)—played according to the rules of tiebreaks in sets—because each player has a valid claim to being called the rightful winner. A GT would have the salutary effect of giving each player an incentive to strive hard to win every game—even every point—lest he/she win in sets but lose more games. This would make competition keener throughout a match and probably decrease the need for a GT, because the game and set winner would more likely coincide when the players fight hard for every game and point.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.671
Threshold uncertainty score0.534

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.217 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it