The Master's Wheel
This title is shamelessly stolen from the 1998 move
The Mask of Zorro. Explanation given by Zorro, as played by the incomparable Anthony Hopkins:
Quote:
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This is called a training circle, a Master's Wheel. This circle will be your world, your whole life. Until I tell you otherwhise there is nothing outside of it. ... As your skill with the sword improves, you will progress to a smaller circle. With each circle your world contracts, bringing you that much closer to your adversary, that much closer to retribution.
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Over time I've described the progression in this game as well, with a racket not a sword of course, in similar terms of a series of concentric circles. I think it's a useful word picture, and in competitive world here the part of bringing you closer to your adversary is very true as well. In the current struggle, Nasir Chittoor is leveling up through the various ranks of the game but his true targets are not really visible. If I do my job reasonably well, Chittoor-Fitzpatrick, Chittoor-Intodia, and so on will be matchups that are quite important at the top of the game in about five years' time. Yet for the moment it is only rarely if ever that these encounters will occur between the lines, so many and varied are the venues available to them for tournaments at this level, and so spread out that one week on the calendar is as useful as the next.
If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, that perhaps even my haphazard MS Paint skills are worth more than that paragraph you just wasted enough of your life to read, showing decidedly questionable judgement in the process. A visual representation may be better.
At press time there were 2,778 players with at least one ranking point on the pro tour. Additionally there will generally be 100-150 more participating in practise events that are unranked, and more beyond that who are unranked and playing amateurs - those that haven't gotten far enough to actually gain a point and get a ranking. Add all that up, and
the outer black circle serves as our baseline, the largest circle. It represents an even 3000 players, a nice round even estimation. The size of the other circles are displayed relative to that full amount.
Then we come to
second circle, here shown in red. This represents everybody who has graduated Amateur play, or the Futures-and-above range. That's the area that Chittoor has just entered. Our next goal is to reach the Top 200, and the Challenger Circuit. That's
the yellow circle. As you can see, at that point I'm going to soon need a 'zoomed-in' graphic to even be able to see much of anything. Futures and up represents the top third, Challenger and up the best <7%. So even here, we're aiming for a pretty select group.