u/ChadMurphyUMW

Lots of talk about Ben Johns and is he slipping - tl;dr my model doesn't think so, but he's facing challenges from an improving field.

• Three finals in Vegas—in singles, men’s doubles and mixed. He beat Christian Alshon on his way to the singles final.

• My men’s doubles rating for Ben is almost exactly the same as it was in January 2025, slightly down from June 2026. JW Johnson, Alshon and Patriquin have made big gains over that stretch.

• Singles tells a similar story: a small estimated dip for Ben, while Haworth, Hunter Johnson and Alshon climbed. Staksrud has been near the top throughout.

• Ben can still contend in every draw. In a deeper field, but winning a triple crown would take top form on his part and a little luck.

Ratings are from the weekly update on October 3, see the final slide for methodological details.

Ben Johns being 32% to win is pretty decent/generous from my POV, but the model likes what it likes. Amazing that Waters and Bright are 99% favorites against Black and Parenteau, but that's what happens when the two head and shoulders clear of the rest of the field women play together I guess?

Tardio and Johns being a coin flip with Alshon and Daescu is fun, should be interesting. Big day, lots of good matches.

Sorry for being late today - you can always see the predictions on https://chad-murphy-data.github.io/pickleball/live.html but I try to get these up early. Been busy + working on some other stuff today.

Ben Johns is favored to make the men's singles finals and has a reasonable shot at a triple crown, Alshon/Pisnik are big underdogs v Bright/Patriquin, but more alive than I might have thought, and the best match of the day should be Black/Parenteau v. Fahey/Schneeman. Can Fahey come back after disappointment yesterday?

Very surprising to me, but the model thinks Ben Johns (42%) is very much a live underdog against Christian Alshon (58%) in men's singles. Much closer than Lea Jansen (79%) over Genie Bouchard (21%).

Women's doubles has the only other competitive match today, with Tyra Black and Catherine Parenteau being a coin flip against Sofia Sewing and Tina Pisnik. Hyped for that one and hoping Black and Parenteau win the close one.

The API that powers my "here are today's matches" so the model can pull the probabilities has been fussy this week, but that won't stop me~! Not a tone of competitive matches today, but a few fun ones. Very much looking forward to seeing Sewing v. Christian and Brascia v. Bouchard in women's singles.

Women's Singles Daria Walczak (50%) vs. Milan Rane (50%) Mary Brascia (52%) vs. Genie Bouchard (48%) Sofia Sewing (56%) vs. Kaitlyn Christian (44%)

Men's Doubles Diamond / Freeman (56%) vs. Howells / Tellez (44%)

Men's Singles, Mixed Doubles and Women's Doubles have no match at 60/40 or closer. The nearest are Zane Ford vs. Gabriel Joseph (61/39) and Kovalova / Humberg vs. Sleeth / Truong (61/39).

Lots of lopsided matches, but some fun competitive ones as well:

Men's Singles Yates Johnson (60%) vs. Camden Chaffin (40%)

Mixed Doubles Weil / Loyd (52%) vs. Braham / Erokhina (48%) Stone / Brascia (53%) vs. Dimuzio / McGuffin (47%) Sleeth / Tellez (56%) vs. Haworth / Walczak (44%)

Men's Doubles Bricker / Torresin (51%) vs. Alhouni / Pham (49%) Johnson / Hargreaves (55%) vs. Hoover / Madsen (45%) Santini Ayon / Poland (60%) vs. Mercado / Dagnall (40%)

I didn't include the methods slide this time, but you can read it in just about any other post on the forum or my website where you can follow the matches live: https://chad-murphy-data.github.io/pickleball/live.html

TL;DR

• Anna Bright is now rated +7.8 (90% interval 7.3 to 8.2), against Anna Leigh Waters at +8.4 (8.0 to 8.7). For the first time since our data starts in January 2024, their credible intervals overlap.
• Two years ago Bright was a full point behind Waters and basically tied with Jorja Johnson for second. The gap is now 0.6, and most of that closing has happened since June.
• In MLP this season, Bright went 0-4 against Waters before the July 12 Gold Final and 4-4 since.
• The model gives Bright about a 3% chance of being the best women's player right now. Waters is still around 97%, so it's still very much her spot.
• Waters is rated +8.4 on a scale where +11 is the theoretical max. With an average partner, she'd beat an average pro pairing roughly 11-3.
• None of this is a prediction. The model describes what has happened, and the range of what comes next is wide for both of them.
• Method: Bayesian point-level model on ~40,000 pro doubles games. Tested on 884 games it had never seen, it called 77% of winners. Every number comes with an uncertainty range. Fuller description on the last slide

Full rankings info, methods, and other fun stats at: https://chad-murphy-data.github.io/pickleball/rankings.html

Edit: I should have called out this is about doubles only, not singles. Thanks to the commenter who kept me honest!

Love that Haworth and Staksrud are a literal coin flip, curious if Fahey is better than my model thinks given her MLP performances were so strong.

I'm rooting for Tyra Black and Meghan Dizon, but that should be a really close match. Fun to watch. And I love Noe Khlif and Eric Oncins making it to the semi-final, maybe there's an upset there?

A few really competitive matches and some relatively big favorites today. Can Kate Fahey keep her MLP form into PPA? Can Black and Dizon avoid an upset v. Tuionetoa and Irvine?

I know most people aren't singles fans, but Goins and Khlif is a really fun one (I'm a Khlif fan), and Sewing and Buckner should be competitive as well.

Mixed doubles has Truong and Parenteau as slight favorites v. Tellez and Sleeth, women have Humberg and Castillo moderate favorites against Buckner and Christian (a bit surprising to me), and a few good ones on the men's side including a close one in Klinger and Chaffin against Howells and Tellez.

All relatively routine today, things should get more interesting as the week progresses.

Some good ones today, Grayson Goldin a slight favorite over Tyler McGuffin, Schneeman and Sock are slight favorites over Sewing and Diamond, Howells and Tellez are favorites but Koszuta and Luhring are live (23%).

You can follow live at https://chad-murphy-data.github.io/pickleball/live.html

So the matches aren't fully over yet but I wanted to post what we have as of now.

Also, I **think** finals are now Best of 3 and now Bronze medal starting with this tournament? That's the best info I could see, let me know if I'm reading it wrong.

Big upsets in the semi's, thought Tyra played the best match I'd ever seen her play in the women's doubles semi-final. Looking forward to seeing if they can pull off an upset or if ALW and Bright are just too strong for even Tyra at her best.

Big tournament right in my backyard, sadly I won't be going but excited to see the matches on PickleballTV~!

• Bright & Waters and Black & Jorja Johnson are both big favorites in the women's doubles
• Johns & Tardio and Daescu & Alshon are strong favorites in men's
• Johns & Waters are heavily favored, Bright & Patriquin are strong favorites in mixed
• Waters and Fahey looking strong in women's singles, Haworth and Staksrud both a little better than a coin flip in men's

All the usual favorites, but the men's singles should be real competitive matches. If you can't watch on TV, you can follow the scores and live win probabilities at https://chad-murphy-data.github.io/pickleball/live.html

Before the MLP semi-finals, a poll on X asked how likely the St. Louis Flash was to beat Dallas. A significant majority of people picked "probable, around 75%" or "sure thing." Anna Bright posted that she voted "likely, 55 to 60%," and wrote that the poll’s result was surprising and a little disrespectful to Dallas. Her line: it's sports, you have to play the games.

I said in another post about the topic that we don’t play the games on spreadsheets and it’s easy to say from my air conditioned analytics cave. But here's what the data says about that 75%: when you back it out all the way down to individual rallies, it means Dallas win 48 out of every 100. That is nearly a coin flip, and a narrow gap between two top teams.. Small edges just add up faster than they look.

In side-out scoring, a small favorite in every rally is a slightly less small favorite to win a point.

Assume a fixed rally split, every rally independent. Team 1’s rally win rate is 52% over a Team 2. That’s a slight favorite, barely better than a coin flip. In side-out scoring, 52% turns into ~55% of  the points, which turns into a close win on average. With 11 points (or more) needed to win, that 55% multiplies quickly up to ~67% to win a game.

Layer 2: best of 3, best of 5.

Now let’s stack games. We already said a 52% rally advantage turned into a 67% game advantage. A team with that advantage wins 75% of the best of 3 matches, and 80% of the best of 5 championship Sunday matches. A team that wins 48% of the rallies only wins 20% of a best of 5. 

Taking it back to the original poll, an MLP match is somewhere in the middle of those two (let’s call it best of 4). A 52% rally advantage* turns into a 60% outright win, 30% for a 2-2 tie that goes to a DreamBreaker, and an outright loss only 10% of the time. If you believe St. Louis are even slightly better than Dallas on average, then that 75% number seems more than reasonable (60% + (30% * 0.5) = 75%).

*This is simplified to assume each team has exactly a 52% rally advantage over the other teams they’re playing, the iid assumption is fine for here and curious readers can do the math required to see how this varies when probabilities aren’t identical across all four games

Real matchups, from the model.

So far that was a narrow rating gap between two hypothetical teams. What does it look like in real life? I went through my model’s probabilities and found some matches that have happened among top pros across a range of predicted rally win probabilities.

Here are real mixed doubles pairings using current ratings from my model.

Rally split on the left, game win on the right.

Favored Team	Underdog Team	Rally %	Single Game	Best of 3	Best of 5
Andrei Daescu & Tyra Black	Noe Khlif & Tina Pisnik	52%	67%	75%	80%
Ben John & Anna Leigh Waters	JW Johnson & Jorja Johnson	55%	88%	96%	99%
Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters	Christian Alshon & Emma Tuionetoa	60%	97%	99%	99%+

Small edges add up fast.

Columbus's run was memorable for a reason

Columbus's run last year is remembered precisely because runs like it are rare, and they’re rare precisely because even though top pros have narrow edges between them, those edges compound over time. That’s why the rarity is the story. And the reason a champion grinds for every little advantage every rally is that every rally matters more than it looks: the format turns each one into something bigger. 75% isn’t disrespectful, it actually says that across four games a slight St. Louis edge predicts you win 3 out of every 4 times.

The whole argument in one line

52% → 55 → 67 → 75 → 80 (RALLY → POINT → GAME → BEST OF 3 → BEST OF 5)

Methods, briefly

• All numbers come from PICKLES v2, a Bayesian skill model fit on every scraped MLP and PPA pro doubles score. Ratings current as of September 2.
• Rally splits come from a serve-aware side-out model, with a league baseline where the serving side wins 43% of rallies between equal teams.

Compounding (the likely apocryphal quote from Einstein and the 8th wonder of the world)

• Game probabilities come from the exact race-to-11 distribution over point share, calibrated so nothing shows as 0% or 100%.
• Best-of-3, best-of-5, and MLP matches treat games as independent, which slightly flatters the stronger team.