When opponent players in a racket competition anticipate the course of a struck ball, they use the kinematic clues when the ball is struck as clues, including various contextual informations, such as the position when the ball is struck and the status of the game. This study proposes a measurement method of the state transition probability that shows the connection between two strokes as effective contextual information for increasing the accuracy of a player's anticipation of the course of a struck ball. The state transition probability that is calculated by the proposed method shows the struck ball sequence pattern for a player, and whether characteristic differences can be found between players is examined. Two matches of opposing players in a soft tennis singles match competition were analyzed in this study. The two-dimensional actual coordinate data of the drop position of the ball was acquired from the target matches. The courts were divided into three sections from the left to right direction, the depth direction, and from the net towards the baseline. The striking of the ball within these sections was defined as one state, and the state transition probability matrix was measured. The result shows that the state transition probabilities of two players, namely, the characteristic differences in the struck ball sequence pattern, were observed, and their effectiveness as contextual information of the prediction clues was demonstrated.
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