Mike Rogers: In this episode, we're going to use Tommy's poker background to explore a skill that translates directly to senior tennis, reading patterns versus reading people. We break down how experienced poker players separate emotional reads from statistical tendencies and how senior tennis players can tell the difference between a temporary hot streak and a reliable, repeatable pattern. And when it makes sense to trust the data in front of you instead of your gut instinct. Tommy, it's great to have you on and excited to dive into this.

Tommy Rounds: Thanks so much for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here.

Mike Rogers: Well, let's just start with this for for listeners who may not know poker strategy. What is the difference between reading a person and reading a pattern?

Tommy Rounds: So. Reading a person would involve looking at people's behaviors. It could be anything from emotions to physical mannerisms. People get as ⁓ detailed as looking at somebody's neck pulse, the way they put chips into the pot, things like that. Reading patterns would be more related to the sorts of actions that they take. For example, how they bet, the bet sizes that they use, things like that. If you wanted to translate that to tennis, ⁓ reading the person would be looking at how people interact with themselves, oftentimes between points.

Mike Rogers: If you take one thing from this conversation, it's that you don't want to react to every hot streak or emotional outburst. You want to read real patterns and how your opponents actually play. I know I'm going to start paying more attention to where they serve, where they go under pressure, and how comfortable they look on specific shots. And let that guide my decisions instead of my nerves. If this helped you think differently about your next match,

Tommy Rounds: Sometimes people like to yell at each other. They like to do self-talk. There's a ton of information in people's self-talk. Like you can get people going, ⁓ come on, Mike, fight, you know, and if you're saying stuff like that, I could probably get a good read that maybe you might not be feeling so confident. Or somebody might say, ⁓ hit the ball, hit the ball. And they might be feeling tentative, things like that. Pattern based reads in something like tennis, similar to poker, where you're going to be looking at some where somebody hits the ball, ⁓ sorts of things that they like to do if they have favorite shots or they have favorite patterns. If they're serving, if they

Mike Rogers: You're down 4-5, 30-40, and your opponent has just ripped three forehand winners in a row. Most 50-plus tennis players would panic and change a good plan. But professional poker players know when it's just a hot streak and when it's a real pattern they can trust. Today on Insider's Playbook, I'm talking with Tommy Rounds, a former college tennis player turned 20-year high stakes professional poker player with a master's please like and subscribe to the channel. It really helps us to grow this and reach more tennis players over 50. And stay tuned, a new episode of Insider's Playbook drops every Tuesday morning.

Tommy Rounds: have certain locations they seem to be going to way more than others. So that's kind of ⁓ a quick overview in a nutshell of pattern-based versus person-based reads.

Mike Rogers: in data science, and now helps pros and top juniors use game theory and probability on the court. It's funny when you talk about tells, I'm always remembering that story Agassi used to tell about Boris Becker, how he read, he would stick his tongue out a little bit when he was going to serve a certain way.

Tommy Rounds: Yeah. Yeah, I came across that actually, and that was one of those moments where I realized I was a huge fan of Agassi and huge fan of his strokes and the way he hit. But I realized at that point, like that guy is just a natural born, you know, brilliant strategist too. He's not just hitting the ball. He's a very smart guy.

Mike Rogers: And the fact he didn't reveal it to him when he was having a beer with them was...

Tommy Rounds: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Mike Rogers: So in poker, how do you separate a player's personality from the tendencies and how they bet? Can you do that?

Tommy Rounds: Yeah, there are certain people that might just from a visual look or the way that they act outside of the table, you might think, ⁓ they're going to be kind of meek. They're going to be mild. ⁓ And there's other people who are the opposite who are totally flamboyant, but then they get in the game and they absolutely go wild and vice versa. So it's really important to try to. It's a delicate balance of looking at reads and trying to gather all these pieces of information. Like when I'm playing poker, I'm trying to pay attention to everything. Everything people say, all that kind of stuff. But the ultimate arbiter of all of that comes down to how they act. So you can kind of twist yourself into knots and kind of create images of somebody as to who they are. And I think you could probably do the same in tennis if somebody shows up with the fanciest clothes and all the greatest racket and they talk confidently and they're doing all this different stuff you might be like ⁓ my gosh what have I gotten myself into and then you realize that they're a beginner as well or somebody who acts extremely bold and brash and then they might ⁓ play in a much more conservative manner so I think it's really important to kind of take these things with a grain of salt pay attention to them but ⁓ let let the action speak and in the very end of it all

Mike Rogers: And probably their emotions too, are there ways to, know, or do you have any examples of how an emotional read or somebody can use an emotional gesture or something to mislead their opponents or mislead another player?

Tommy Rounds: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I mentioned before, if you're a self-talk person, ⁓ you could toss out stuff like that. You could toss out little bits and pieces or you could kind of, you could signal frustration or you could say like things like I mentioned before, you could say, you know, hit the ball, Mike or whatever, any sort of thing that you actually, the idea with that stuff is that you want to do it if it's something that you normally do, because if it's something that's out of the ordinary for you, if all of sudden you're kind of the silent guy and then all of sudden you're talking, you're doing a lot of stuff and it doesn't really add up to what you're actually doing on the court it's kind of obvious what you're doing but if If you do that kind of stuff, it's absolutely possible to kind of toss out little nuggets here and there. Or if you have somebody who's watching you kind of quietly be like, ⁓ my gosh, I'm feeling so tired from last night. Little things like that if you're willing to go down the gamesmanship route. But generally speaking, I think that ⁓ the two approaches would be to kind of, you your verbal and body language to kind of do a little bit of acting here and there. ⁓ And the other one is just to try to be cognizant of those sorts of things and try to not give away stuff. Those are kind of the two real valuable things.

Mike Rogers: You know, it's funny when you're watching the pros. mean, you have some people that are just like ice when they play. don't know whether they, you know, like a rebocking or somebody like that. You don't know whether you a good shot, a bad shot. And then you have people that like a rubel of that boy or us to Panko who, you know, has a face after every single shot.

Tommy Rounds: Hmm Absolutely, I would say my my advice on that would be Try to stay like if you're somebody who is emotional. It's okay to be emotional But you just have to you want to try to maintain your consistency So if you're the emotional person and then when things get tight you start to climb up or you're not feeling good That's information that you can be revealing but also If you're the kind of person who who gets really bottled up and someone like myself or somebody else says hey Don't give away anything you might actually kind of twist yourself into not and make yourself play worse. the most important thing I think is to just kind of realize who you are and allow yourself to be like if I got with Ravakannan and said, you got to show more emotion. You got to let it out. You got to give the, you know, the doll fist pump and do stuff like that. It's going to throw her off. Whereas Rubeliff, if I said, hey man, you got to don't give that stuff away. Don't do that. He's going to bottle too much of it up and he's probably going to up playing worse.

Mike Rogers: Well, he'd only hit himself on the head with the racket twice instead of five times.

Tommy Rounds: Yeah, yeah, baby steps,

Mike Rogers: So. How would you translate some of this into tennis for players, especially senior players that need to read somebody?

Tommy Rounds: I think that, like I said... Make sure that there's a lot of information that people give away in places that are kind of underrated. Like when you're talking to somebody before a match, if there's any small talk or if you see the way that they're talking to other people, oftentimes people will give away stuff. You can see stuff where people are kind of like, if you see people kind of moving and doing this a little bit more than usual, you might get a feel or if they're kind of, know, just kind of shaking their back out or something like that. There's a lot of little micro pieces of information that you can get from people. where you might realize, know, if I have to, if I move them around, they might not be super happy about it today, given how much they're doing the extra stretching and things like that. so I think that, looking for those sorts of things that they might seem like they're not part of the match because they're before the actual first toss goes up, but there's a lot of stuff that can come through with, with all of those things. Even if it's something as simple as somebody says, Hey, you know,

Mike Rogers: Right, right. Okay.

Tommy Rounds: I watched this match, I can't believe that this person plays this way. There's lots of little things that you can start to get little reads on.

Mike Rogers: So when you're playing somebody in poker, is there a way to tell the difference between they're just like on a hot streak or they really know what they're doing and they're very calculated in what they're doing and playing and how they're playing?

Tommy Rounds: That's a great question and that's one area that people get tripped up a lot. And I think that the key is in short-term samples, it actually is really, really hard to figure out the difference between what's going on. So if I'm playing against somebody and in a short span, all of a sudden they bluff or they show a bluff three times in a row or something like that, it'd be really easy for me to be like, oh my gosh, this person's crazy. They just bluff it all the time. But... those short-term bits of randomness can be really confusing because sometimes stuff just happens in a short streak and the same thing can happen in tennis but I guess a really simple way to put it is like if you and I were to flip a coin and we're gonna flip it 10 times it doesn't just go heads, tails, heads, tails anything that's happening with sort of ⁓ you know uncertainty or probability there's the possibility for streaks to happen so if you play against somebody in tennis and then the first three serves that they hit on the deuce side they hit out wide it's really easy to get caught up and go, ⁓ my gosh, they just serve to the forehand every time on the do side. But that could be just kind of their randomization in one of those little outlier things. So I would say the best way to figure that stuff out is to draw your conclusions really loosely in short term stuff. Try to pull in extra bits of information that you might have heard them say or do. Maybe you've seen them out at the court with the bucket of balls and they have the, you know, the cone set up to one spot and then you play them in the match and they're doing the same thing. That might allow you to kind mess around with those shorter-term samples, but I think the best long-term advice that I could give would be hold on to those very loosely and then try to make a big sample because that again that short-term randomness is something that could really really be confusing and just comes about just because of the way probabilities work. ⁓

Mike Rogers: So when should you use your gut instinct versus trusting the data that you're actually seeing?

Tommy Rounds: That's a great question. Part of that is ⁓ it's one of those, yeah, it's one of those, know it when you know it. It's like, how do you love somebody? There's a part of you that's like, you have an explanation and an answer for certain qualities and things, and then there's a part of you that just kind of does. But.

Mike Rogers: Was that the $10,000 question?

Tommy Rounds: There's also part of you in this, that same, using that same analogy, sometimes you might feel something for somebody and it might turn out to be something different than what you expected. So I think that the best way to go about the trust is to try to bring in other pieces. Like I mentioned, as many other pieces, if you just have a feeling, if you're just like, you know what, this person, I just know that they're going to serve here. If you can kind of tack on another reason to that, that's when I'd be more likely to trust it. Whereas if I just had this random kind of, this idea just popped in my that you and I are playing and all of sudden I'm like, I know that Mike is gonna hit it exactly here on the serve. If I had a reason for that, if I was building off of things you've done in the past, some other things you told me or maybe things I'd seen you do in other matches and things, I'd be much more likely to go with that gut feeling than if it was just one of those sort of, I feel like these are the right numbers to pick for the lottery sort of feelings, that you're just pulling out of thin air.

Mike Rogers: So how many games that you're playing against this guy do you think it would take before you could start really reading him pretty well, do you think?

Tommy Rounds: I mean, I think it's going to depend on...

Mike Rogers: Could be the first three, the first five.

Tommy Rounds: I think in a few games you could start to get a real good feel, especially probably more from ground stroke rallies because those there's going to be more shots that are hit in a ground stroke rally than there's only, you know, there's one first serve that's hit to start a point, but there's multiple ground strokes that are hit. And so you can start to get more of a read. think pretty quickly you can get pieces of information. I mean, people like Brad Gilbert have spoken about this as well, where you can get information even from the warmup, you know, how somebody's hitting in the warmup. You know, maybe they stand a little bit over to the

Mike Rogers: Mm.

Tommy Rounds: side to protect their backhand so they don't have to hit it. You can get those kinds of things. But I think a few games in you can grab those sorts of things and start to get a feel. And I think the way that I would do it is I wouldn't be so scared of just drawing conclusions off of small samples. I would just kind of draw them ⁓ with a pencil, so to speak, rather than a pen, know, just kind of lose conclusions, but don't be afraid to draw them, but just don't be too wrapped up in them.

Mike Rogers: Okay, okay. if you to give senior players one rule for reading opponents, you know, really accurately, ⁓ what would suggest?

Tommy Rounds: You know, one rule, that's a great question. I'm going to go, you know, outside of some of the things that I've said, I think one of the sort of a little bit more, um... unintuitive maybe sorts of ways to look at it is to look inward. I think a lot of times when I'm playing against somebody whether it's poker or tennis or any sort of a game a lot of the time the things that they're doing that are hard for me to deal with it's probably not I'm probably not the only one you know so if you're playing a tennis match against somebody and somebody's doing something that's really difficult ⁓ chances are that you're not gonna be the only one who feels that way. So those are the sorts of things to maybe be on the lookout if you know that your opponent is a thinking player. And those are also the things to kind of look at to maybe try to incorporate and do to your opponent. But I think one thing to look forward to read to people is... You know, in tennis, would say looking for comfort. think that you can get a lot and especially at the recreational level, you can really kind of get a feel for how comfortable somebody is when they hit their shot. You know, you've watched plenty of tennis and played plenty of tennis in your life. So when you see somebody hit a stroke, you have kind of that intuitive feel, I'm sure of they just don't look comfortable there. It looks like that's a stroke that they're working on or that they don't really like to hit or the technique is not sound. So I think when you see those sorts of things, you can start to get a feel for what they're going to do. Like if somebody is really, they hit the backhand kind of like this and in a strange way, they're probably going to try to do stuff to protect it. They're probably going to try to shift their positioning or they're going to try to hit the ball to certain places that make you less likely to be able to hit there. So I think that that's, that's probably what I would do. Look to yourself and then also look for a person's comfort when they're out there on the court.

Mike Rogers: Well, that's what they say is try to make the other person uncomfortable. Even if that means you got to hit a few moon balls.

Tommy Rounds: Absolutely. Absolutely. Real quick anecdote, if you don't mind, I want to give a shout out to my sister. But my sister was a seasonal athlete. She played a lot of other sports and she played in a league where there was other like, you know, top national juniors and stuff like that. And she ended up winning her league one year because she was willing to hit the ball that went 15 feet over the net. But she also had a lot of top spin. And so the ball was bouncing and pushing them to the back fence. And that just drove him crazy. She was willing to play for three hours if it took, you know, so those things like Like you said, sometimes those things that are not the prettiest or they feel kind of lame or people kind of grumble at it for a reason. It's not easy to deal with.

Mike Rogers: Well, and I think especially in league sometimes we feel like we want to look better than we are rather than, do I want to win no matter what it takes and no matter how bad I look.

Tommy Rounds: Absolutely. That was my story as a kid. I wanted to hit the winners. I wanted to hit the cool shots that I saw Sam Parsonagasy hit. And, you know, I probably would have been a lot better off just toning it back a few notches. Maybe not all the way, but a few notches.

Mike Rogers: That's right, that's right. Well, Tommy, is there any other points that I missed that you could advise us on in reading opponents and reading patterns?

Tommy Rounds: ⁓ no, I think that was great. I think, I think one little side note and something that I would say, ⁓ I would say, just, I saw one of the comments in your video. I wanted to kind of give a shout out to that person, ⁓ because they had said, Hey, I don't think that strategy is for me. don't execute well enough and all that stuff. And I just wanted to push out to everybody that my opinion is that strategy is accessible to everybody. It's one of those things where I think there's a common misconception that in order to play, to do play strategically, you have to have all these skills to be able to execute, hit the ball. here and do all these fancy things, but the way I look at good strategy is really it's all about executing to the highest level that you have. And so in that sense I think it's kind of a inspiring thing, know, because you and I we have the ability to play strategically as well in a sense as Alpharass if we if we're trying to play as well as we can for our own skills, you know. So if people are out there going, I can't do this, I don't know where the ball is going to go when I hit it. you absolutely have a game that you're building off of that you can play the best for what you have. So ⁓ yeah, that's the last thing I would say. And then most of all, ⁓ have fun out there.

Mike Rogers: Fantastic. Well, if somebody wants to get in touch with you and find out a little bit more about how they can use poker strategies for tennis, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

Tommy Rounds: Absolutely, they can go to my website, gamesetmatchanalytics.com and contact me through the form there or they can just email me directly at tommy at gamesetmatchanalytics.com.

Mike Rogers: Fantastic. And I'll have links in the show notes. Well, again, thanks for coming on.

Tommy Rounds: Thanks for having me, Mike.