2.4.1. Tactical benefit
According to the feature of badminton match, i.e., each rally has only one result and each stroke has limited start placement and destination, the players have limited choices to conduct their techniques and tactics. Thus, if we consider each single rally is an individual game with different weights, we can count all the rallies together, and compute the benefit for each stroke. Given a number of rallies , we construct a gaming tree for all the strokes in each rally . and compute the benefit for each node in the gaming tree. Specifically, each node of represent a possible stroke, and all the nodes of covers all the strokes in the selected rallies.
Figure 1 presents a simplified example (the specific technique and the destination for each stroke is not considered here) of building a gaming tree for three rallies
, where
denotes strokes,
denotes the player, the
denotes the placement, and
denotes the gaming tree node. To illustrate, consider the strokes
, though they belong to different rally, they are the first stroke for each rally and share the same player and placement (player
with the placement 1), leading to the same tree node position
. Note that, two strokes can be classified into the same tree node if and only if their player and placement are same and their previous strokes (if exist) all have the same player and placement. For this reason,
and
can be classified to be node
, as they succeed
and
separately (both can be regarded as
) and have the same player and placement. Meanwhile, though
and
also have the same player and placement, they belong to different tree nodes as their previous strokes are different, e.g.,
and
have different placement.
Based on the gaming tree constructed from each stroke
, each tree node represent a possible stroke and we can derive all the possible strokes for each single rally, as each rally starts from the root nodes (have no predecessors) of the gaming tree and ends at leaf nodes (have no successors). Meanwhile, the benefit of each possible stroke can be obtained by considering formula 3 and the gaming tree, i.e., we summarize the score of each stroke
that can be reduced to the same gaming tree node
(denoted as
) and regard it as the benefit for that stroke. Generally, the benefit of each Node N can be computed as follows.
For example, given two strokes and that can be reduced to the same gaming tree node , and leads to the server player wins while is the opposite, we calculate the benefit of as . Note that, according to the formula 1-3, we can obtain that . Thus, the benefit range of each node is [-1, 1].
2.4.2. Evaluation Model
The evaluation model for the badminton matches include two steps, i.e., (i) constructing the gaming tree for the history strokes and evaluating the techniques and tactics for two players, and (ii) analyzing the rallies and strokes using the constructed gaming tree.
Evaluating. Given a set of existing matches, we first formulize each rally as
and each stroke as
. Then, we add
into the gaming tree. For example, consider the rally
, we first find if there exist a node
that has the same
as
. If not, we create a new node
for
into the gaming tree. After that, we update the
with
. Next, we check the leaves of
and check the following strokes
as
. After all the rallies and strokes are evaluated and the gaming tree is constructed, we compute the net benefit for each tree node as follows.
where
denote the function that finds the maximal value among {
}.
Consider the example shown in
Figure 2, where four rallies are given and the gaming tree is constructed with nine nodes. Specifically, in the first rally
, the server
wins and continues to serve. In the second rally
,
loses and alternates the service. However, the opponent player
loses the rally
, and the service is alternated again. Finally, the player
wins the fourth rally
and the match ends. To model this match, we first build the gaming tree and compute the scores for each stroke, then the score of each tree node is obtained. Based on the above, we then compute the net benefit. Clearly, when it starts from
, the serve player always loses as the net benefit is negative.
However, when it comes to start from , the tactics becomes complicated, as the opponent has two choices to play, i.e., move to with the benefit of -0.0067 or move to with the benefit of 0.333. According to the Nash Equilibrium, the opponent should move to and will win this rally. Thus, though in this example the player that serve at , , and seems to have more possibility to win the match, the opponent also has the chance to change the result. This makes our proposed gaming tree not only have the ability to evaluate how the player have performed in the existing matches by leveraging the net benefit, but also can analyze how the players use their techniques with tactics by finding Nash Equilibriums in the gaming tree.
Analysis. Based on the above, we find that the score of each stroke illustrate how much important that stroke is to the whole match. Thus, we propose the following rating strategy to find Nash Equilibriums in the gaming tree, which helps analyzing the existing strokes, rallies, games and matches.
Based on equation 6, we compute the importance weight of each node . Next, we propose the win-loss flag table to determine whether the node leads to the server win or lose. Note that, the win-loss table is obtained by following the strategy that the player will choose the best strategy to win the game, and the opponent will make the player lose the game. To illustrate, consider a node that is an odd stroke, there are two situations: (i) is a leaf, the server must win when is positive, while the server lose if is negative, and the result is draw if =0, and (ii) is non-leaf node, the server win when it holds that is positive, and the result is lose or draw if the value is negative or equal respectively. Based on the above, we can also analyze the result when is an even stroke. The summarized table is shown below.
Table 1.
Win-loss flag table.
Table 1.
Win-loss flag table.
Node |
Win/ Lose |
Flg(N) |
Odd/Even |
Situation |
Odd Stroke |
Leaf node, and the is positive |
Win |
1 |
Leaf node, and the is negative |
Lose |
-1 |
Leaf node, and the is 0 |
--- |
0 |
Non-leaf, >0 |
Win |
1 |
Non-leaf, <0 |
Lose |
-1 |
Non-leaf, 0 |
--- |
0 |
Even Stroke |
Leaf node, and the is positive |
Win |
1 |
Leaf node, and the is negative |
Lose |
-1 |
Leaf node, and the is 0 |
--- |
0 |
Non-leaf, >0 |
Win |
1 |
Non-leaf, 0 |
Lose |
-1 |
Non-leaf, 0 |
--- |
0 |
Generally, based on the Win-loss flag table, the Nash Equilibrium for each tree node can be obtained, and the correspond to rally result (win, lose, or draw). Especially, we can decide whether the server will win or lose by directly checking the function for the root node (i.e., the initial stroke).