Saturday, June 6, 2009

IBM Visual Match : A tool to analyze a tennis match visually

At this year's french open, IBM and Roland Garros have come up with a fresh and innovative way to analyze match visually. This tool, called as Visual Match, can track how the momentum switched back and forth between the players. It's basically a two series line graph of the momentum of two players.

If you are looking over the course of entire match, It can tell you the key points with striking clarity. More importantly, you will know what was 'The turning point' of the match. See the following picture. It's a screenshot of Federer's semi final. You can make out very easily that turning point of the match came at Set 4-Game 4, when Del Potro lost the service game with 2 forced forehand errors. Federer gained the control of the match afterwords which is evident from the graph.

Courtesy: IBM and Roland Garros-Visual Match

Cheers to guys at IBM and Roland Garros for this impressive tool. As they say, a picture says thousand words and this is a striking example. Read this link on the french open website for the description. See this tool in action here for the matches.