Two weeks on from the end of 2012's World Tour Grand Finals, and a comprehensive study of the year-long tour has been completed. We all know and love these open tournaments spanning the globe each year. They give us something to tune in to when no other big events are running, and supply the brunt of world ranking opportunities for the world's top players.

Below you will find graphs, tables, and screenshots from the information gathered across the 15 tour opens and Grand Finals. These will show you details such as: total matches from each tournament, total points played, percentage of upsets, number of donuts (11-0), longest match, shortest match, most common game score, highest game score, as well as some interesting observations I have made.

Here we can see the total matches from each tournament. This shows that 2012's first Open was in fact the biggest of the year, with 733 matches played (12% of entire tour). The Hungarian Open also won in games (3384) and points (61,866).

The above pie chart displays the percentage difference between men's and women's participation, using total points played as a reference. The margin between genders is slightly larger than it was in the 2011 season, as shown in my thread World Tour Stats Comparison 2011 - 2012. Perhaps this represents the increasing lack of female players in recent times.

In this bar graph we can see a further partitioned picture of the pie graph before. This shows us which events points came from. As before, the trend of Men > Women is consistent across all three platforms. In the world tour Open Singles 66% of points were played, with Under 21 and Doubles at 21% and 14% respectively. However, due to most Under 21 and Doubles matches being best-of-5, if we measure these percentages by matches, Open Singles is down by more than 5%. This is because Under 21 and Doubles only operate by best-of-7 from quarterfinals onwards.

2012 had 95 finals across the six events contested at each tournament. That's 16 for each category, except for the China Open where Li Xiaoxia and Ding Ning withdrew and the final was a walkover, an unfortunate anticlimax. This year has had plenty of thrilling finals however, 18 of which went the full distance to a deciding game. Of the 16 men's singles finals, only the Grand Final between Xu Xin and Wang Hao was ended as rapidly as 4:0, Xu Xin taking the title as we know.

The above two images are actually the same table, or rather multiple tables in one very busy spreadsheet. I chose the 5-set stats tab because it's not as wide as all the others, so it's still readable even when squished into the narrow boundaries of this blog. At the top is a ratio of Normal:Upset results. This shows there are significantly more upsets in Under 21 and Doubles matches than in Open Singles matches. As this is a select area of the statistics (around 1/4 all up), it's not completely representative of the entire total. Nevertheless it displays plenty of info which is similar to best-of-7 results. For example, men's matches are generally longer than women's, with more matches going to 5 games as opposed to more matches in 3 and 4 games for women.

From row 29 to 58 is the game-score tally table. This indicates exactly how many times certain scores occurred. An example being the number of times 11-0 happened was four, and the highest game-score was 25-23 (still not the highest overall!). We also see that 11-8 was the most common score, with 1107 occurrences (15%). Beyond all that is one of the spreadsheet's more recent additions, the match-point-tally table. It's pretty much the same as the game-score tally table, although it has a far wider range (33 to 171) to encompass all expected scores. Obviously 33 is the lowest score possible, and fortunately this embarrassing outcome did not take place. The nearest to that was 37 points, in Qatar and Poland. The sad victims were Anthony Fata of Libya who was crushed 11-2, 11-1, 11-1 by Belgium's Lauric Jean in the U21 group stage at Qatar, and host nation representative Alicja Czarnomska in Poland, she was destroyed 11-1, 11-2, 11-1 by Japanese teen Shiho Matsudaira in the U21 group stage also. So, some complete ruthlessness there, but at least mercy points were given. Kudos to those players for not giving up.

On the other end of the scale, in the longest matches by points, honors are shared again. Both in open women's singles contests this time. Dora Madarasz (Hungary) beat Minami Doi (Japan) in a titanic comeback, 9-11, 9-11, 16-18, 11-4, 11-9, 19-17, 11-5 at the Czech Open. Earlier in the year Li Qian (Poland) overcame Yuki Nonaka (Japan) in one of the closest matches of the year, at the Chile Open, 8-11, 13-11, 15-13, 13-15, 11-7, 7-11, 14-12. Both matches reached 161 points, just two points shy of 2011's record. So next time you have an epic 7-game battle, count up the points and see how you compare with the longest matches in the 2012 World Tour.

Other interesting figures

Longest Game: Yoon Jae Young (Korea) beat Gavin Rumgay (Scotland) 27-25 in the first game during their group stage duel. From then on it was smooth sailing, Yoon won 4:0.

Number of Donuts (the number of times 11-0 occurred): 18

Least Upsets: Chile had only 15% upsets, far below the average of 24%.

Most Upsets: This year Russia had the highest percentage of upsets, at 37%.

The Hungarian Open had the highest total matches, but this was not the case across all categories. It was mainly due to a high entry in the open men's singles, and doubles events. In fact, the German Open contained 12.5% more open women's singles matches than Hungary, and the Polish Open featured the highest number of matches in both under 21 events.

Total number of Matches: 6024

Total number of Games: 28,519

Total number of Points: 521,572

Thank you for taking the time to have a look at my statistical analysis of the 2012 World Tour. The information shown is 100% correct. If you have any queries as to how it was collected, or if you'd like to know some other statistics (within reason) please let me know in the comments section below.

ttGuru