Tennis World

PREAMBLE
When watching sport I frequently find myself looking out for and defining the factors that make the sport exciting, the decisive moments that directly influence the final outcome, so maybe in soccer the goalmouth action, in golf the great iron shot from the rough or the pressure putt that achieves a birdie or fails to drop and adds another bogey to the scorecard, in horse racing the final two furlong run to the line. Whatever has gone before is important of course but these are the moments that you remember and should, in my opinion, be the factors that must be re-created in a sports replay simulation that needs to be of short enough duration to make it playable in the context of a large scale competition, event or season. Dice-and-chart replay simulations cannot produce the action in visual form so we are left with attempting to simulate the tension points to, hopefully, achieve the right ‘feel’ of the sport.

Watching ‘Wimbledon’ this year I was struck by how important holding service has bebecome in the modern game, maybe more so for the Men than the Ladies, but important none the less for both. Dropping your service immediately changes the dynamics of the game, you need to break back quickly or the chances are the set is lost and the momentum of the whole match switches to your opponent. So when ‘Owzat Games suggested to me recently that maybe a quick-playing tennis simulation would be a useful and popular addition to our range I came up with the idea that is the basis of the game engine for ‘TW’. The other ‘Owzat requirements were that it should be up-datable by the user from information freely available on the internet and, if possible, cover both the Men and Ladies Singles and maybe Doubles also. So that was the brief, hopefully ‘Tennis World’ satisfies those issues, and also reproduces some of the excitement and tension and produces accurate results with the chance of a few upsets along the way.

Lambourne Games, July 2022.