General / Matthew Walton / 21 February 2008 /

Matthew Walton explains why it is better to think of the ATP Tour as a series of stages, or 'legs', than one long event.

Players are always at pains to remind us, lest we should forget, that the ATP Tour is a long, gruelling, ten month slog. To be fair, given the travel, physical exertions, mental pressures and relentless schedules involved, they've probably got a point.

One of the ways to cope with such a long season is to break it down into smaller periods of time. You can then take each 'leg' in turn and steadily work through the calendar of events in a more measured fashion.

For form students this approach has many merits. The ATP Tour isn't one long season of tournament play, it's a number of shorter ones pieced together in a chain. The 'bite size chunk' method allows us to isolate performances and scrutinise results in a much more useful way. Allow me to explain:

We started the year as per usual with the 'Australasian Swing' visiting places such as Sydney, Adelaide, Auckland and culminating with the Open itself in Melbourne.

Then comes the 'leg' we are in now which sits between the Australian Open and the two Masters Series events at Indian Wells and Miami. This period forms it's own little pocket of action. And form.

In the midst of this 'leg' there are three concurrent mini-tours. We have the 'South American Swing' which goes to Vina Del Mar, Costa Do Sauipe, Buenos Aires and Acapulco. There is the 'North American Swing' which visits Delray Beach, San Jose, Memphis and Las Vegas. Finally we have the 'European Swing' which, these days, takes in Marseille, Rotterdam, Zagreb and Dubai.

These mini-tours are quite parochial affairs in that players don't tend to flit between them too often. They play on one tour, almost exclusively, for this month long period and then move onto Indian Wells in March.

As a result we get a number of familiar match-ups. Players will often compete against each other a couple of times in quick succession. Much like sprinters on the All-Weather or Liverpool against Chelsea, they seem to oppose each other almost every week!

Any angle we can get on these meetings is a significant help. What makes one player win one day and the other the next?

The table below shows the form for the 'South American Swing' for the last five years. It shows tournament winners and runners-up during this period.

As you can see, only twice has a player won two of the four events in one year - and both of these were pretty special players at the time (Gaston Gaudio and Rafael Nadal both in 2005). Also, we've only seen three other players make two finals in a year - Nicolas Massu in 2006, Gustavo Kuerten and Carlos Moya in 2004.

The point being. If players are regularly in competition against each other and periods of 'good form' and 'bad form' last for some time, logic would suggest that there should be more players, who are in good form, making multiple finals in these mini-tours.

That's the fact to remember. Even though form would suggest that the winner of Vina Del Mar should play well in Buenos Aires, more often than not he doesn't. Unless he's a stellar player the facts say that you can almost draw a line through him for the rest of this month long spell.

Ok, maybe players take it easy after a win, perhaps they don't play every week. But the fact remains that multiple wins on these mini-tours are rare and, when achieved, are usually done by very good players.

Take the mini-tours in North America and Europe. Here we see that only once in the last five years has a player won twice in the same year (Tommy Haas, Delray Beach and Memphis in 2006) and only three other players (Nicolas Kiefer 2004, Vincent Spadea 2004 and Lleyton Hewitt 2006) have made two finals.

In Europe, we have Roger Federer (2003 and 2005) as the only two-time winner with Mikhail Youzhny (2007) and Ivan Ljubicic (2005 and 2007) as the only players making more than one final.

As you can see, a list which pretty much suggests top ten ability.

These quirks of the formbook are interesting to note. As backers we need to spot every crumb of information we can find. Such knowledge gives us the edge over our fellow Betfair users and we all know what that edge makes for ... PROFIT!

Already we've seen Fernando Gonzalez, Andy Murray, Nicolas Almagro and Kei Nishikori win since the Australian Open. Question is, will they win again before Indian Wells?

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