Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own strategy on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You must understand the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, strive for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

Once you have correctly judged your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to decide their characters. Like temperaments react similarly, and you may judge men of your own sort by yourself. Different characters you have to seek to compare with people whose reactions you already 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 control one’s own thought processes after studying them very carefully .

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he was he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a pretty clear indicator of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her torpid mind to work out a safe method of reaching the net.

Then there is the other kind of baseline player, who would prefer to remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to break up your game. He is a very dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above merely strikes the ball without much thought about what he is really doing, while the latter always has a solid, thought-out strategy and sticks to it.