Game Theory for Squash
After learning about dominant strategies, best responses, and more in class, I had a desire to apply these topics to squash, a sport which I wholeheartedly enjoy and currently play for Cornell’s varsity team. From a spectator’s point of view, squash might not make that much sense because the playing conditions are quite foreign compared to other sports (besides racketball). At a very basic level, you must win eleven points to win a game, and you need to win 3 games to win a match. In order to win a point, the ball needs to bounce twice before your opponent can hit it.
When devising the best strategies to win a point, there are many factors at play. Just to mention a few, there is a player’s physical ability, mental focus, shot selection, and knowledge of the opponent’s whereabouts. Considering there are numerous factors, there is hardly ever a dominant strategy in squash because a player’s strategy could change depending on the score of the game and the surrounding circumstances. For instance, you might have to adapt to a different strategy throughout a game if your opponent begins winning more points. Just playing with one strategy will not automatically result in a win. An exception could be that there is a significant level gap between you and your opponent. In this situation, simply using shot selection to force your opponent to continuously move around the court will result in your opponent tiring out and a victory for yourself. In terms of best responses, most best responses in squash focus on hitting the ball away from your opponent. We need to assess more specific situations, thus I will split these situations revolving around the front and back halves of the court. When in the front court, if your opponent hits a dropshot and is recovering to the ‘T’, your best response has to be hitting the ball to either of the back corners. This is where knowledge of your opponent’s whereabouts comes into play; if your opponent is moving towards the backhand side of the court, your best response would be to hit to the forehand back corner and vice versa if your opponent moves towards the forehand side of the court. When in the back court, your best response would be to hit the ball into the front of the court, thus either a boast or a dropshot would result in the best outcome for yourself. There are just two very simple examples of how game theory applies to squash, and there are hundreds of different scenarios which happen during a squash game which results in the game theory having many different outcomes.
The article which is linked at the bottom of the post goes into intense depth of many different strategies in squash. One thing that I found very interesting about this article was that it analyzes squash from a more historical standpoint, having been published in 1989, and thus the strategies are a bit out dated because the scoring for squash was modified. Nevertheless, this shows how important scoring is when considering game strategies, especially for a sport like squash.
Simmons, John. “A Probabilistic Model of Squash: Strategies and Applications.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C (Applied Statistics), vol. 38, no. 1, 1989, pp. 95–110. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2347684.