Betfair Official Blog

French Open Betting: Trading on breaks of serve

"Magical" Matthew Walton wrote this latest column with traders rather than bettors in mind. If you like nothing better than a volatile match to secure a nice "green book", read on...

The clay court season is a fantastic time for Betfair traders. Why? Because the opportunities for activity, whether backing or laying, are the highest we'll see during the course of the year.

That's not to say the hard court or grass court seasons are uneventful - far from it, they have their own characteristics which we can exploit when the time is right - but here on the dirt we can really get our teeth stuck into some serious trading.

The main reason for this is the high frequency of service breaks. Players regularly trade breaks as the clay offers much less of an advantage to the server. Grass, carpet or hard courts? Forget it, the server has a great advantage on these fast surfaces. But here on clay the serve merely starts the point, it rarely ends it.

Consequently, as backers, we need to be looking for opportunities to get involved in the action. Have the figures at our fingertips and be ready to pounce.

First up, here's a table which lists the top players in two distinct categories :-

Serve - how often players have their own service broken.
The more often it happens the higher their rating, i.e. big serving Andy Roddick is ranked No.1 (rarely broken), the more lightweight Filippo Volandri is at No.72 (often broken).

Return - how often players break their opponent's service.
Here the higher the figure the more often a player breaks the serve of his opponent. We find Nikolay Davydenko at No.72 (most frequent service breaker) and Ivo Karlovic at No.1 (very rarely breaks his opponent).

What we then do is put these two figures together. We're looking for players who score a high mark in each table, and so a high figure overall, as they are the ones who (a) break their opponent's serve frequently but then (b) fail to hold their own serve.

What does this make for? A see-saw effect as the momentum switches from one side to another. One player is doing well one minute, the next minute it's the other. This causes significant shifts in their odds, up and down, and so ample opportunity for us to get stuck in.

Hence we've produced this combined table which puts these two figures together to create a 'Volatility Index'. If your player has a high figure then prepare yourself for action. If both players in a match are highly rated ... watch out!

Interesting to note that 7 of the top 10 are what we'd call 'clay courters' and of the other three, Davydenko and Gicquel have played a lot of tennis on the surface and only Ginepri stands out as something of a curio.

Taking some examples from this week, two players with high figures, Marc Gicquel and Tommy Robredo, are due to meet up in R2.

In Robredo's R1 match with Guillermo Coria they generated 32 break points between them in their 39 games (82%) - an average of a break point in almost every game! Gicquel was no slouch either against Viktor Troicki as there were 31 break points in the 41 games (76%) of their R1 match.

Similarly, Juan Ignacio Chela against John Isner in R1 had 33 in 48 (68%) and Fernando Verdasco had 28 in 49 games against Santiago Ventura (57%). And, incidentally, they met each other here in 2006 and in the 39 games the match lasted there were 26 break points (67%). They now meet up again in R2.

And those players just mentioned all rank highly on the Volatility Index. We have Gicquel at 122, Robredo at 101. We find Verdasco at 99 and Chela at the top of the shop, Mr. Inconsistent himself, as number 134.

So, the higher the combined figure, the more likely we are to see break points, service breaks and sharp Betfair fluctuations. In short, great trading potential.

And just to put these figures into some kind of context. When Alejandro Falla played Ivo Karlovic in R1 on Wednesday, we saw just 16 break points in 59 games (27%).

Ivan Ljubicic, who is way down on the list with a rating of 14, played Eric Prodon in R1 and their match had just 7 break points in 38 games (18%). His R2 opponent, Diego Junquiera got a rating of just 34% against Adrian Mannarino when they met in R1.

As we know, many backers are driven by the heart not the head. Short-term, knee-jerk bets are struck, almost by instinct.

Here, we have the statistics to play the longer game, to see things in their true perspective. In this way, we won't over-react to service breaks, we can see them as being a big deal or not, depending upon the index figure which we have created above.

Study the table, apply the figures to the matches you see at Roland Garros and maintain this study throughout the event.

Matches which generate a break point ratio in between 40%-60% are within normal boundaries but higher or lower than this and you have to take note for future reference.

Take the R3 match between Andy Murray and Nicolas Almagro, both players had comparable statistics in their last match. Murray had 14 break points in 26 games (54%) and Almagro 14 in 28 (50%). Both also fall within the middle column of our index suggesting a close match is in the offing when the pair meet.

Looking further into the tournament, watch out for possible QF's between Nikolay Davydenko (107) and David Ferrer (118) which makes up at 225 whereas Novak Djokovic (72) against Simone Bolelli (25) is just 97.

Clay offers fantastic opportunities to trade in-running. Breaks of serve come thick and fast and with these statistics, added to the markets on Betfair, there is tremendous potential for you to make good money.

Enjoy the French Open but enjoy winning even more!