Why tennis serve bots, on the verge of extinction, star in their twilight at Wimbledon

New York Times

04-07-2025

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — Carlos Alcaraz has won almost everything there is to win in tennis, but he has spent most of 2025 going after one of the sport's least desirable accolades: being labeled a serve bot.
At January's Australian Open, Alcaraz wrote, 'Am I a serve bot?' on a camera lens after hitting 14 aces in his second-round win against Yoshihito Nishioka. During his run to the title at last month's HSBC Championships in London, which he won on the back of some supreme serving, he said: 'I'm starting to think I'm a serve bot.'
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As Alcaraz's opening matches at Wimbledon have proved, he is not yet a serve bot. His first serve has wavered in both, but his incredible groundstrokes, volleys and movement have compensated. The serve-bot archetype does not have those skills. The term was coined to describe giants such as John Isner of the U.S. and Croatia's Ivo Karlović, who were perceived as being able to do little other than bang down big serves from their close-to-seven-feet frames.
Alcaraz turning it into something aspirational reflects two wider trends in tennis. The first is the reclamation of the term by a new generation of players, all of whom like to log their speed-gun readings, but also want to win the biggest prizes in the sport.
The second is that being a serve bot, and having a faster serve than everybody else, is no longer the most important edge in men's tennis. Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, the 6-foot-8 Frenchman, hit the fastest serve in Wimbledon history Monday against Taylor Fritz, another big server who is a fan of discussing what makes a serve bot. Mpetshi Perricard hit a ball at 153 miles per hour (246 kilometers per hour). Fritz blocked it back and won the point. Serving fast has become so de rigueur in men's tennis that having the ability to return the ball is the edge — and being a true bot requires a degree of ineptitude on return to go with the heavy artillery on serve.
Having been labelled a serve bot throughout his career, Isner, who reached the Wimbledon semifinals in 2018, decided he wanted to break down exactly what the term meant when he retired.
So he and his buddies, including Sam Querrey, another serve-reliant American but not quite a bot, came up with a formula. 'We agreed collectively that if you do not break more than 10 percent of the time, you're a serve bot,' Querrey, a former world No. 11 who is covering this year's Wimbledon for ESPN, explained in an interview at the All England Club on Wednesday.
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'It's more about how infrequently you break serve than it is how good you are at actual serving.'
Others will have their own definition, including Alcaraz, who clearly does not long to be bad at breaking serve, but there is some logic to the emphasis on the weakness of the return, especially in the contemporary game. Historically, focusing on just serve quality would mean Roger Federer and Pete Sampras, two of the finest servers in the sport's history, would be labeled as serve bots. That would be patently absurd, even if possessing a serve like theirs to go with their other great talents is what Alcaraz wants.
Sampras and Federer won 89 percent of their service games across their careers, and 24 and 27 percent of their return games. Isner and Karlovic won 92 percent each for service games, but 10 and nine percent of return games.
To put Alcaraz's longing into contemporary context, the man with the best service-game win percentage over the past year is his great rival Jannik Sinner, with 90.6 percent. Novak Djokovic, a man whose return tends to be eulogized much more than his serve, is fourth, with 89.2 percent. The best players tend to be pretty handy at what is the most important shot in the sport.
Alcaraz is down in 12th, on 86 percent, but the most important thing to understand about the twilight of the serve bot is that their prowess on return has become what sets them apart.
Sampras was averaging around 120 mph (193 kph) when he won his first Wimbledon title in 1993. That made him one of the most consistent big servers in the game. In 2025, 120 mph is something like the bare minimum, even for players below 75 in the world rankings. Having a fast serve has become so commonplace that even players with the fastest, including Mpetshi Perricard, Fritz, and his compatriots Reilly Opelka and Ben Shelton, largely joke about being bots because they know that their special skill is no longer what can make them stand out when it comes to wins and titles.
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Opelka, a giant server and Isner's natural heir, was also involved in devising the 10 percent formula. 'The stats show it,' he told a few reporters on Tuesday, referring to his and Isner's serve bot status. He added that of the current players, 'me and Mpetshi Perricard are probably the only two bots. Like, true bots.'
The numbers back him up. Mpetshi Perricard (7.9 percent) and Opelka (9.1) are the only two ATP players to win less than 10 percent of their return games in the past year. Mpetshi Perricard has taken this to extremes by becoming the first player to go through an entire five-set match without earning a single break point — and then doing it again (first at the Australian Open in January against Gaël Monfils, and then against Fritz at Wimbledon this week). But Mpetshi Perricard's desire to get to tiebreaks and win them appears strategic, at least while he develops his baseline game.
He is practicing his serve just 10 per cent of the time, and Fritz acknowledged that Mpetshi Perricard had done him damage from the back of the court, especially for the four sets that were played under the roof. But the American would be a good case study for how to evolve from the old serve bot to the new. Regarded as a one-dimensional server for the early part of his career, Fritz has developed his groundstrokes and movement to become a U.S. Open finalist and top-five player. 'I guess he wouldn't be a serve bot. He would just be a bot,' his good friend and compatriot Tommy Paul said, laughing, on Tuesday. Paul Annacone, one of Fritz's coaches, agreed about his player's evolution.
'Yeah, he did graduate because now his game has different levels,' Annacone said in an interview at Wimbledon on Thursday.
Fritz himself uses the term more liberally. 'Anyone who is a good server, they're like a bot. We use it as a compliment just to say that this person has a good serve,' he said in a news conference Tuesday.
Fritz, who has won 19.2 percent of his return games in the past year, is way clear of the serve bot threshold, as is his second-round opponent, Gabriel Diallo. Fritz ended up beating Diallo in five sets, with the players serving 27 and 26 aces, but three breaks of serve apiece stopped it from feeling like a serve-bot fest.
Paul, meanwhile, praised Opelka and Isner for taking ownership of the term. 'At first, it was used that way (as an insult), maybe like seven years ago, it was used in a bad way. That's how it started, people on Twitter calling Reilly or Isner a serve bot.
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'They handled it well and changed it into making it funny. Now they make jokes about it.'
Querrey confirmed that he, Isner and their friends, including former American world No. 21 Steve Johnson, do have these kinds of conversations, while Opelka gave a great demonstration of this self-deprecation at the Canadian Open in 2021 when he discussed whether Nick Kyrgios would qualify as a serve bot.
How do you define a servebot? 🤖@ReillyOpelka discusses (cc @NickKyrgios)#NBO21 pic.twitter.com/qL3UU6DdVj
— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) August 15, 2021
Opelka's compatriot Shelton is another who would be seen as 'too fun to watch' to be a serve bot, but he has also made a conscious effort to add variety to his game. Shelton called improving his return 'my biggest focus' in a recent interview, and he said on Tuesday: 'I used to be a bot for sure, and I relied on my serve a lot. There are so many great returners, guys who can neutralize pretty much any serve. You have to be able to back it up.
'Having a great serve and getting free points is huge on a surface like this, but year-round, it's important to have a multi-faceted game.
'I don't think it's an insult at all. There are matches when I'm a complete bot, but I don't think that I'm a bot all the time.'
Shelton spoke last year about slowing down his serve and going for spots instead, and Fritz echoed this Tuesday when it was put to him that Mpetshi Perricard had said someone could hit a serve at around 168 mph (270 kph) before too long. 'The question I have is: Why? There's no point. It's much better to hit 140 to a spot than just hit the ball and serve as hard as you can,' Fritz said.
Players have wanted to avoid the epithet partly because it puts an implied ceiling on what a player can achieve. A genuine serve bot might crack the top 10, but they are not likely to get much higher. Players that have to play a lot of tiebreaks are putting themselves in high variance situations, in a sport where winning just over the half the points — and sometimes fewer — means victory. But on their day, these players can be a real problem, adding a layer of jeopardy to a draw.
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'Those guys are so dangerous, especially (grass) tournaments like this,' said Annacone, who previously coached Sampras and Federer and agreed on the serve bot ceiling.
Britain's Greg Rusedski possessed a mega serve but had holes in the rest of his game. A former world No. 4, he said, 'Please call me a serve bot,' in a recent phone interview.
'But you can't be a serve bot and get to the top five in the world,' Rusedski continued. 'Isner, Karlovic they could not crack into the top five because of their movement.'
With serve having been replaced by return as an edge, and the top players in the world seeking to bolster, rather than define, their games by serve improvement, as much as Alcaraz loves to talk about it, the twilight of the true serve bot is well underway, which makes Mpetshi Perricard, only 21 and with so much upside but a pretty major flaw, such an interesting proposition.
'There's an evolution in the serve bot going on right now,' Paul said. 'I think everyone can play. Everyone jokes about it, but Reilly is actually pretty good from the ground. We'll play ground games, and he is right there with me in practice. He'll beat me. Everyone can play tennis.'
Paul added: 'You got to be able to do it all. Obviously people who don't have huge serves have to move better, they have to return better. But everyone does everything. The smallest guys are hitting aces, and the biggest guys are making returns now.'
Alcaraz, who is looking to win a third straight Wimbledon title, and to ultimately be regarded as the greatest player of all time, is desperate to be given a descriptor once reserved for bullying inferior players. While Mpetshi Perricard, a rising player who fits the archetype, is trying to evolve away from its most pejorative sense while retaining its essential skill.
The twilight of the serve bot may be here, but the term's future looks bright.