Okay, let me tell you about this Nadal tennis score thing I worked on. It wasn’t some big, complex project, just something I threw together because, frankly, I was getting annoyed.
I love watching Rafa play, you know? The intensity, the fight. But trying to follow the scores sometimes… ugh. You check one app, it’s slow. Another website is cluttered with ads or stuff I don’t care about. Sometimes the scores are even slightly behind the live broadcast, which drives me crazy. I remember one time during a really tight match, I think it was against Djoko, my stream was ahead of the score app. Point finished, crowd going wild, and the app still showed the previous score. Totally killed the moment.
Getting Started
So, I thought, how hard can it be? Tennis scoring isn’t rocket science, right? Love, 15, 30, 40, deuce, ad… We all know the basics. I figured I could make something super simple just for myself.
First, I just opened a basic text file. Didn’t even bother with fancy tools at first. I just started mapping out the logic. What happens when a player scores? How does the game score change? Then the set score, then the match score. I had to remember the tie-break rules properly too.
Thinking through the steps:
- Player A scores: Check current game score.
- If game score is less than 40, increment it (15, 30, 40).
- If game score is 40-40 (deuce), need to track advantage.
- If player scores with advantage, they win the game.
- If player scores at deuce, they get advantage.
- If player scores against opponent’s advantage, back to deuce.
- Game won? Increment set score.
- Check if set is won (6 games and 2 clear, or 7-5, or tie-break).
- Check if match is won (best of 3 or 5 sets).
Putting it Together
Then I actually started coding it. Just a simple script, really. Nothing fancy. I wasn’t building a public website or anything. I just wanted something I could run on my own machine while watching the match.
I made functions like `addPointPlayerA()` and `addPointPlayerB()`. Inside those, I put all that logic I mapped out. Had to handle the state changes – whose serve it is, current game score, set scores, tie-breaks. It was a bit fiddly, getting all the conditions right, especially around deuce and advantage.
I tested it by just running the script and calling the functions manually. `addPointPlayerA()`, check output. `addPointPlayerA()`, check output again. `addPointPlayerB()`, see what happens. Simulating a whole game, then a set. Found a few bugs, like forgetting to reset the game score when a game was won, or messing up the tie-break count. Went back, fixed them, tested again.
The Result
After a bit of back and forth, I got it working. It’s super basic. It just prints the score to the console like:
Set 1: Nadal 6 – Federer 4
Set 2: Nadal 2 – Federer 3
Current Game: 15 – 30
That’s pretty much it. No fancy graphics, no live data feed (I still have to input the points manually as they happen). But you know what? It’s fast, it’s clean, and it shows me exactly what I want to know without any distractions. When I’m watching Rafa play now, I just have this little window open, tap a key to add a point, and I have the score right there, instantly. Much better than wrestling with slow websites or ad-filled apps during crucial moments.
It’s not perfect, maybe one day I’ll try to make it fancier, but for now, it does the job I wanted it to do. Simple, custom, and solves my annoyance. That’s usually why I end up building these little things.
