Never hit a second serve to the same place twice

Second-serve location is the most predictable thing in professional tennis, and returners have quietly stopped having to guess.

Down the middle, into the body, kicking up to the backhand. That is the second serve, on repeat, at nearly every level of the sport. It is safe, it is technically sound, and it has become so uniform that the returner no longer has to read anything. He steps in already knowing the height, the side and roughly the bounce.

Once the returner knows, the serve stops being a serve. It becomes the first ball of a rally in which the server is already behind, standing inside the baseline hitting a defensive forehand off a return he could have predicted from the toss.

The objection is obvious and I understand it. A wide second serve on the deuce court has less margin, sits closer to the sideline, and misses more. Nobody wants a double fault at four-five. Fine. But predictability is not free either, it is only invisible, because a lost point that began with a comfortable return does not appear in the stats as a serving error. It goes down as a lost rally, and the serve escapes blame entirely.

Look at how the geometry changes. A kicker to the backhand pulls the returner across but leaves him hitting the shot he practises most. A serve into the hip takes away his arms and produces a shorter, weaker reply than almost anything else, and it misses no more often than the standard kick, because the target sits in the middle of the box rather than on a line. That one is badly underused and I cannot work out why.

There is a game-theory point underneath all of this that needs no equations. If you have three options and use one of them nine times out of ten, the other two are worth more than their raw success rates suggest, because using them occasionally raises the price of every serve you hit. Mix badly and even your best pattern degrades.

So the instruction is not hit a riskier second serve. It is stop hitting the same one. Vary the height, vary the side, and accept a slightly worse average outcome on the individual ball in exchange for a returner who has to make a decision.

Make him think. A thinking returner is a late returner, and a late return is the entire point of serving.