Does the server have an advantage

Some trivia about data collection; baseball & cricket alert (Jeff).

Thanks for the stats! Interesting.  Did you watch all these matches just to count serves? Earning the title, one serve at a time, Super Coach.

In a reference to baseball; The practice of keeping records of player achievements was started in the 19th century by Henry Chadwick. Based on his experience with the sport of cricket, Chadwick devised the predecessors to modern-day statistics including batting average, runs scored, and runs allowed. 

Seems like Table Tennis stats would start with;
Serve success
Serve type; pendulum, tomahawk...
Serve placement; to forehand, backhand, long, short
Return of serve; loop, push
Third stroke 
Total hits
Winning hit
General description of rally

Too much?

The real question becomes does this information change the way we approach serve & receive? 

Roger

Now this is funny. During the Olympics, on the channel I had available, the counts of total points won, points won on serve and points lost on serve were displayed at the end of each game and match. It did surprise me several times to see that the rate of points won on serve was below 50%. So I started to record them into an Excel file. I didn't have to do it for too long until I noticed that this "around 50%" statistic was actually very common. Of course it can be higher when a player has really good serves and plays an average opponent, or lower when an average server encounters a very agressive over-the-table reciever.

In the old days, when we played up to 21 points games, winning 2 points on your opponent's round of 5 serves was considered a "mini-break" (in refenrce to tennis, where it's really hard to win against the serve). I think this has changed mainly because of the "no contact point hiding" serving rule, in conjunction with the development of the banana flick and the incredible fitness of today's players (their ability to do the backhand flick anywhere on the table and still recover to play the next ball).

This doesn't make the serve any less important though. From a certain level on, if you're serve is week, your opponent will be able to attack it aggressively everytime, putting you in a low-chances of succes scenario everytime. Unless maybe you're a defender and actually want your opponent to attack.

Look at the Olympics Men Singles final. Zhang J.K. was certainly not at the top of his form, but that underlines even more the fact that Ma Long only won half of his serve points. And even in a bad day, it's astonishing to see that only won 7 of his 36 serve points, and made twice as many points against the serve than with the serve.