Okay, so I got really into the US Open this year, and I wanted to figure out who the dark horse picks were going to be. I’m no expert, but I do love digging into stats and seeing what I can find.
First, I started by just looking at the official US Open website. I figured they’d have some basic info on the players, their rankings, and maybe some recent performance highlights. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Getting My Hands Dirty With Research
Then I dove into some tennis forums and blogs. I was looking for discussions, you know, where people who really follow the sport are talking about up-and-coming players. I wanted to see if any names kept popping up.
- I spent a good chunk of time on Reddit. Found some interesting threads.
- I checked out a few tennis news sites – the usual big ones.
- I even looked at some betting sites, just to see who the oddsmakers were favoring (and who they weren’t!).
It was a bit of a mess, to be honest. Lots of opinions, lots of conflicting info. But I started to see a few players mentioned repeatedly as potential surprises.
Compiling and Analysing my ideas.
I grabbed a notebook and started jotting down names, rankings, recent tournament results – anything that seemed relevant. I basically created my own little database of potential dark * helps me keep tracking of my notes.
I tried to compare their performance on hard courts (since that’s what the US Open is played on) versus other surfaces. I also looked at their head-to-head records against some of the top-ranked players. Did they have any surprise wins? Any close matches that showed they could compete at a high level?
It was a lot of manual work, flipping between websites, scribbling notes, and trying to make sense of it all. I am not gonna lie I got really into it!
Finally, I narrowed it down to a handful of players that I thought had a real shot at making a deep run in the tournament. My own personal dark horse picks. It was fun to put my “analyst” hat on, even if it was just for my own amusement!
