As a tennis analyst and
trader it’s my job to look at tennis statistics for hours a day and try and
come up with edges in the market for the forthcoming matches.
The main problem which I
encountered was that tennis statistics tend to be governed by what is available
from organisations such as the ATP website or tournament website and these are
often simply ‘tennis statistics’. I have
put that in inverted commas because that’s what they are – statistics for the
tennis fan and armchair viewer. Very
rarely do you get a statistic on the internet or TV that makes you sit up and
take notice. I’m talking about the
critical in-play information that you need to make a quantitative judgement on
how a match might develop in the future.
The best statistics which
were available were things like “win percentage when a set up”, “win percentage
when a set down” and “deciding set win percentage”. Don’t get me wrong, those are highly useful
statistics and can be considered in any analysis.
However, those only cover situations
at the end of a set, what about situations which happen during a set – where market
swings can occur regularly? There are no
statistics on these whatsoever and most traders, fans and pundits alike are
forced just to make subjective assessments on matches such as ‘Granollers is a
huge choker’, ‘Almagro never does it easy’, ‘Andy Murray comes back from a
break down really often’, or ‘Murray starts matches really slowly’. Are these
things true? The people uttering those
comments can’t have the first clue. The
thing is, notable events tend to happen less than people think but because they
stick in the memory when they do, people think they happen more regularly. Twitter is full of people stating ‘1.0x just
got beaten in play’ and of course those events do happen. But surely if laying 1.0x blind was
guaranteed long term profit, everyone would do it and we’d all be living in the
Bahamas drinking cocktails all day in front of our laptops! It clearly isn’t.
The inability to find such
information on statistics during sets disappointed me. What I wanted to know was who started well or
badly at the start of sets, who is clutch or who chokes at the end of sets, and
also which players can recover from a break down or defend break leads.
I had only one option – to
plough through all the point by point data to do the research myself. And that’s where I am now. I finished the ATP version last week and the
information that I uncovered is extremely valuable and I’m certain will lead to
extra profits in the markets.
Knowing that some players
give up a break lead over 60% of the time (Martin Alund, Paul-Henri Mathieu and
Guido Pella) will give me a huge edge in trading those players’ matches. Having the knowledge that Juan Monaco and
Julien Benneteau get a break deficit back on serve over 50% of the time
(putting them in the top 5 for that area – much better than their world
ranking) will also serve me very well.
I also found some other
incredible stats out – such as Ivo Karlovic only breaks 2.0% in the late stages
of a set. Whilst the big Croatian is one
of the worst returners on tour, to have such a ridiculously low statistic – it’s
well below his average across all games of 7.1% and the ATP average break of
21.6%. I’m certain that backing the server against
Karlovic late on will yield dividends with this low break percentage – even though
the market expects his opponent to hold a lot more than against an average
opponent, it won’t expect them to hold against him 98% of the time…
Michael Russell was
another interesting player to analyse.
In 2013 he has held 69.3% of the time but late in sets this drops to
58.93% – a huge decrease. It would
appear that he’s a big choker in this scenario and his serve can be opposed
almost blindly against any opponent on this basis late on in the set.
Finally, a few words on
those subjective scenarios I mentioned earlier.
All of those are true statements I’ve heard from others and also thought
myself. Were they correct? Actually they all were to some extent.
Granollers holds 75.5% in
2013. However his hold late in sets is
74.01%.
Almagro gives up a break
lead 31.82%. This is marginally below
the ATP average of 32.54% but is one of the worst in the top 20 for this. Only the weak servers Fabio Fognini and
Gilles Simon have a higher percentage for this, and their overall service hold is 11.8% and 13.4% lower
respectively. It definitely would appear
that Almagro has more problems than he should holding onto a break lead.
Andy Murray has come back
from a break down a huge 58.54% this year.
That puts him second on the ATP list behind Rafael Nadal (68.97%). Therefore backing him when a break down would
appear very viable.
Finally, Murray has won
73.53% of sets in 3 set matches this year.
However he’s only taken the first set 63.33% of the time so it does look
like he starts slow. With his starting price
often 1.0x and 1.1x it would appear he’s a huge candidate for a prematch lay to
back in-play later on at a bigger price.
These examples are just a
few that I’ve picked out from the data on the Ultimate In-Play Spreadsheet which
I released for sale on Saturday. To get
your free sample you can sign up at http://www.tennisratings.co.uk/sign-up.
