Tennis psychology is only understanding the make-up of your opponent’s mind and gauging the effect of your own strategy on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.

However, it is true that you cannot be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding your own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You must understand the effect on your game of the ensuing irritation, pleasure, bewilderment, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it improve your prowess? If so, try for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the cause, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

Once you have accurately measured your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to decide their temperaments. Similar temperaments react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Different temperaments you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you know.

Someone who can control his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of determining those of another for the minds works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One can only regulate one’s own mental processes after studying them very carefully .

The regular, unemotional baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indicator of his/her type of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who normally advocates the baseline strategy, does it because he does not want to activate up his/her slow mind to think out a reliably safe method of getting to the net.

Then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would rather remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intending to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above just hits the ball without much idea of what he is really doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and sticks to it.