Tennis Trading Strategies: Don't look at the score

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Tennis and statistics

Tennis is blessed with a plethora of wonderful statistics and data coming live from the court. It's hard to watch a match without some statistic or another being presented on the screen in front of you. Because of this it's worth using these statistics to get a deeper insight into how you should trade tennis.

Win by not winning

The scoring system in Tennis is quirky. The difference between winning a set 6-4 and losing it, or seeing it go to a tie break could be just two errant shots. You can get into a situation where somebody dominates a match but doesn't end up winning. Tennis is fairly unique sport in that respect and on grass, it's more likely.

A metric some people use to see how well somebody is playing is the 'dominance ratio'. Take the number of return points won and divide that into the opposing player and you get the ratio. According to the Tennis Abstract blog that I read quite often about 7.5% of matches end with a player being more dominant but losing. Since 1991 8.8% of completed Wimbledon matches havbe been like this. If you can hold serve you end up in the lottery of the tie break and with a chance of winning the match. Mens Tennis, which is dominated by serve, is more likely to suffer this fate than the women's game.

Relative strength

So looking at the broader picture is always a better way of assessing what is happening in the underlying match and the relative strength of each of the two players. If you go to the web site of the tournament you are watching, you can look up all the detailed statistics to give you a true feel for the match. 

Look at the score and you may find that while one player has just won the set to take a clear lead, they may have done so without actually dominating the match. It's possible that they may just have won some critical points on the way to that winning that set. Ultimately Tennis boils down to a simple fact. Whoever is better at the big points wins.

This will give you a good clue to whether a comeback from short odds is likely. What you are looking at is the differential between the score you see and the number of points won. If the gap is small but the score difference is large, then that could present an opportunity.

Dominance in action

In the image below you can see that the odds on Del Potro moved out from a starting price of 1.11/10 to 1.42/5 after he narrowly lost the first set on a tie break. The fact the first set was lost on a tie break should tell you how close the match was. But by comparing various statistics it can give you a much better view on things.

In this scenario you would be tempted to back Del Potro or lay Rochus simply because this set was won by a very narrow margin against a strong favourite. If Del Potro came back to win the second set then his odds would obviously return to near the starting odds. What eventually happened was that Del Potro stormed back to convincingly win the second set and you can see the resulting movement in the odds.

In the next example an un-fancied player won the first set against Serena Williams, but only just. Looking at the statistics during the match would have told you the number of points won was only just in front of Williams. After losing the first again on the tie break, she then took hold of match to bring it back in her favour.

Summary

Not all matches play out the same way. It's possible for a player to win a match despite not playing as well as an opponent, but that is most likely when the serve is dominant.

Look at key statistics from a match to see HOW it was won. Combine that with tools like Bet Angel's Tennis trader and you will put yourself in with a good chance of profiting from Wimbledon.

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