How do players talk before a tournament, and how does that change once they start playing? To find out, we took every player press conference this week to see if there were any trends in terms of specific words and themes, as well as tone. We then analyzed the transcripts of players interviewed after last year’s second round to see what was different. Most apparent was the way competition narrows a player’s focus from the broad to the specific.

To paraphrase a line from politics, before the tournament is for poetry. Competing is for prose.

You can see the full breakdown here.