Betting on Tennis
Betting on Tennis
As well as delivering tips, StattoBets hopes to help educate punters in the ways to approach betting on different sports. At time of writing, the 2017 ATP Tour tennis season is just about to get underway, so here’s some insight into what you can bet on, what it all means, and how you might go about getting an edge.
Antepost Betting
Most tournaments only offer betting on who wins each tournament. You can bet win or e/w and if considering an e/w bet especially you should always consider the draw very carefully. If the three most talented players are all drawn into one side of the draw, you may often find there is value to be had betting e/w on a player of slightly lower quality in the hope that the place part of the bet pays out at a good value price. You might even consider hedging the win part in the event they reach the final.
Typically tennis outrights will offer 1/2 odds for a top 2 finish (reach the final), but this will usually reduce to 1/3 odds once the first players start reaching the quarter-finals.
Larger events like the Grand Slams and the Masters Series events may offer further outright markets, such as “To Reach the Final”, “Quarter Betting” and “Most Aces”. You need to think carefully if attacking these markets.
Quarter Betting offers a great chance to back a player you fancy to over achieve without requiring them to win the whole tournament. Think about that player who might have found a pretty nice draw, can beat the low quality in their section, but might come unstuck in the semi-finals against the tournament favourite. This could be the market for you.
On things like “Most Aces” always consider how far a player is likely to go into a tournament, rather than just how many aces they tend to hit. Even if your selection powers down a load in the early rounds, it won’t do you any good if they get knocked out in the fourth round. Players like Raonic and Cilic tend to do well in this sort of market as they have big serves and tend to go deep into the events, while someone like Karlovic or Lopez might hammer them down, but they rarely reach the latter stages these days.
Betting on Matches
Bookies offer a huge range of markets on tennis, with Match Betting their biggest market. These can be combined into accumulators and are a popular way to bet, especially given that in a two-horse race, the favourite will always be odds-on. You can also bet on Set Betting for a bigger price, where you need to choose the exact score. Most ATP Tour and WTA Tour matches are played as best of three, but Grand Slams and Davis Cup are played as best of five in the mens game. Sky Bet offer an interesting expansion on this - Set Exacta - where you predict the set result, but with the set winners in correct order for a bigger price.
Surface
This is hugely important in tennis, and a player who specialises in Clay Court events will often be far less effective on quicker surfaces. Generally, the biggest servers tend to dominate the faster courts as the ball will not hold up on the surface. Think of players like Roddick, Isner and Mahut enjoying their greatest success at Wimbledon. Carpet events, although rare, are also very quick.
Hard Courts are in the middle, with indoor hard always playing faster than outdoor hard courts, and Clay are the slowest and will suit players who build their game around that surface. Not only does the ball hold up and bounce higher, the movement on clay is also very different, with players perfecting the slide.
Thanks to some great work from www.tennisabstract.com the table at the foot of this article rates all the courts in 2016 on a metric which suggests the expected aces on the surface versus the expected aces from the players who played in those events. It’s a pretty good proxy for court speed and shows a couple of really interesting trends.
Quito is the stand out Clay event - completely out of place, and this is down to the altitude involved, meaning the ball travels more quickly through the thinner air. The fourteen slowest courts are all Clay events.
Whenever betting on tennis, pay particular attention to whether a given player likes to perform on that surface. Consider how successful Nadal has been on Clay, or Federer on Grass for instance.
Rating Players
There are many things to consider when rating players, so we’ve covered just a few of the important metrics here.
World Ranking - important as an indicator of course - this is a strong measure of how good a player is, but also consider whether they are moving up or down as a trend. An injury may have seen them out for a long time and affected their ranking considerably, but once back and firing on all cylinders a player might be ranked outside the top 100 but playing like a top 10 contender.
Surface - how suited are they to a particular event or against a particular opponent?
Surface Ranking - similar to the World Ranking, but arguably more useful as mentioned above. Sometimes the sample sizes can be small for some players on some surfaces to be careful. However never forget that when a player has avoided playing on a given surface, there is probably a pretty good reason for that!
Tournament Situation - it’s not unheard of for top players to be less than interested in certain warm-up events. If a player is coming into a final warm-up event ahead of a slam, and draws a vaguely competent opponent, it's worth asking yourself how much effort they might be willing to put in when a rest ahead of that all-important Grand Slam might be higher up the priority list. Especially if the said player has played a lot of tennis already that season.
Serve / Receiving % - a metric we use a lot is % of service points won and % of receiving points won. Looking just at a players results can hide some of this detail. When adding their serve % and their receiving % together you get a view of how well that player has been performing on average. This is a metric you'll see us using a lot. It takes some effort to put them together, but its something that can give a good edge over the market.
More interesting Markets
Bookies offer a lot of extra markets on the biggest matches. When betting on these, think about what metrics are most important. For instance Most Aces is often priced solely on how many aces each player is hitting. Can you find out how many times they are aced though? Roger Federer is well known as a player who doesn’t get aced as much.
First Set Correct Score is another interesting one. Sometimes trends can tell us who is likely to serve ahead of the toss. If one player likes to Serve first, and the other likes to receive first, suddenly the toss is irrelevant. We know in advance that whoever wins the toss, the server will be the same. This means in the mens game, players who serve first are more likely to win 6-3 (they will be serving in the ninth game of course), while those who receive, might win 6-4 more often (they will be serving in the tenth game). This is especially true on hard courts.
Double Faults should be considered on a “Faults per game played” basis rather than a “Faults per match”. Both players will serve the same number of games, so these bets shouldn’t be skewed by how long a previous match has been for one of the players. It’s the same for Ace totals of course.
Hopefully you’ve found this interesting. We’ll look to publish a few more of these guides over the coming months.
ATP Court Surface Speed
