What We Do: Match Previews

The US Open is here! Every day during Grand Slams, we at Dweck Sports distribute resources to help you be better prepared for the following day’s action and watch the most exciting and dramatic matches as they are happening.

For 2026’s final Slam, we are reintroducing everything in one fell swoop. Three articles, all up now, with everything you need to know for us to help you have your most intense, exciting tennis viewing experience yet. And maybe show off a little bit of your newfound ball knowledge in the process. This article is about our Match Previews

The Card

This is the Match Preview card for the first-round match between Carlos Alcaraz and Roman Safiullin. There may be some modifications to the biographical data under the player photos, but this is what a typical card looks like. They have player photos and biographical information, match information, the win probability meter, and some stats.

The Win Probability Meter

In between the player photos on a Match Preview card is the Win Probability Meter. Here is a closer look at it:

The number in the middle is the overall win probability, and the meter breaks it down by sets. The red sections represent the player to the right of the meter (whose name is in the red box), and the blue sections represent the player to the left of the meter (name in the blue box). The darkest colors closer to the player represent that player winning in straight sets, and then the color getting lighter as you go in towards the inflection point represents that player winning in more sets until the lightest, representing the maximum number of sets. In this case, that’s 5 sets.

The Stats

On the bottom half of the card, we have provided 4 stats that provide a snapshot of how the match might look: head-to-head wins, level on serve, level on return, and our fatigue and physicality index. For each of those stats, the green number is better.

Head-to-head wins is relatively straightforward: how many times has player A beaten player B, and vice versa. This may be different from official counts due to a number of data availability and match counting considerations. The most common reasons are that my data only goes back to 2013 and that it includes challengers but not team competitions like the Davis Cup, Billie Jean King Cup, and United Cup.

Level on serve and level on return are our most predictive stats. They are opponent- and surface-adjusted measurements of how good a player is at winning points on their serve or return. One player’s serve number and the other player’s return number are added together to produce a number that we convert into a powerful prediction of how that player will do on their serve. Higher numbers are better for the server. If you are looking for a quick benchmark, an elite number for both serve and return is 0. Any player with a serve number above 0 or a return number below 0 is among the best of the very best in that category.

The last stat is fatigue and physicality index. We have a model that uses a number of environmental factors, personal injury history, and recent volume to predict the probability that a player retires from a match. This is the output of that model. So, numbers will never dip below 0 or above 100 (you will most likely never see anyone above 6), but my typical rule of thumb is that anyone with a fatigue and physicality index below 2 is particularly fresh.