Every racket on the site carries a score out of ten called Our take. Here is exactly how it is built, so you can decide how much to trust it.
The five scales
Each racket is scored on five attributes, each from 0.0 to 10.0:
- Power - how much speed the frame adds to the ball on a full swing.
- Control - how precisely the ball goes where you aimed.
- Ball outlet - how easily the ball leaves the face without you forcing it. Matters most on the defensive lob.
- Manageability - how quickly the racket moves through the air. Governed mostly by balance.
- Sweet spot - how forgiving an off-center hit is.
Our take is a plain average
The overall score is the arithmetic mean of those five numbers. Nothing is weighted, nothing is rounded up, and no marketing adjustment is applied.
What we deliberately do not score
Hardness is the obvious one. A stiff frame is not a better frame - it suits a fast, clean swing and punishes everyone else. Putting a number on it would only push hard rackets up the rankings for no good reason, so we describe stiffness in the Core and Face rows of the spec sheet and leave it out of the score.
The same goes for looks, brand and who endorses the frame. None of them change how the ball comes off the face.
Where the numbers come from
For frames with published independent reviews, we take the reviewer's figures rather than invent our own. For rackets that nobody has reviewed - usually the budget models - we leave the ratings empty and the How it plays section simply does not appear on the page. An empty section is more honest than a made-up number.
What the score does not tell you
A high Our take does not mean a racket suits you. The highest-rated frames in our range are advanced diamonds, and most players would be better served by something two points lower with a bigger sweet spot.
Read the Who it is for line under the price first. It answers a more useful question than the score does.
Scores will change
As we play with frames ourselves, we will replace read-about ratings with measured ones, and the page will say which is which. If a score moves, it is because we learned something - not because a supplier asked.