With the French Open this month and Wimbledon set to grab headlines next month, it’s time to brush up on your tennis betting. If you’re wondering where to start when it comes to those potentially profitable match bets, expert tennis punter Amir Clark is on hand to serve up some ace advice.
There’s an oft-held misconception in sports betting that bookies have the ‘smaller’ sports like tennis covered. Many punters and even tipsters believe that the layers are supremely well-informed, via clandestine links to doctors, officials and various other informants.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is tennis offers the conscientious punter a fabulous opportunity to profit, with match betting – betting on a player to win a match – forming the cornerstone of any tennis gambler’s arsenal.
Bookmakers are vulnerable in any contest where there are only two outcomes. Perhaps realising this, punters have flocked to tennis in recent years, with it accounting for up to 15% of a bookie’s annual sports betting turnover. Despite this, few firms regularly offer prices on women’s matches as the men’s game attracts the most attention. I shall focus on the men’s side of things, though almost all principles apply to women’s matches too.
The most important factor to assess when striking a tennis match bet is surface form. Like horses, tennis players have a preference for a particular court material. Hard, clay, grass and carpet are the four main ones, but the most dedicated punter will be well aware that different types of hard court exist, for example Rebound Ace and Decoturf II, and that players perform differently on each.
Players with extreme grips and long swings are best suited to the slowest surface, clay, and conversely are ill-equipped to perform well on the faster surfaces like grass and carpet courts. Skills such as a strong serve and a potent slice are useful on these quicker surfaces, and one of the simplest strategies in match betting is to oppose a player that has a poor record on a particular surface when he’s coming up against a player who has shown a liking for that surface in the past.
To save you the bother of researching the stats yourself, OnCourt, a results database, is a fantastic tool for tennis betting. It costs $39 and then $9 per year. A trial version of the software can be downloaded from on-court.info. It has tournament results going back a decade and allows every search filter imaginable. For example, you can look up Andy Roddick’s results in American clay tournaments against left-handers – what more could you want?
An obvious example of opposing a player who plays poorly on a particular surface against an expert player would be to oppose a clay-loving Spaniard like Albert Costa on carpet against a player like Greg Rusedski, whose game is perfectly suited to the quick indoor conditions. Equally, were the two to meet on the dirt, Costa would be your man. The stats show Costa has won twice as many matches as he’s lost on clay, a record inverted on carpet, and vice-versa Rusedski.
Watch for feet of clay
Current form is the next most important factor. Players’ form is often cyclical, but consistent performers are fairly easy to spot. Players that lurk around the top 20, like Tommy Robredo and Sebastien Grosjean, can usually be relied upon to see off opponents ranked beneath them. Indeed, in 2001 and 2002 Grosjean lost only nine first-round matches. In that time he played 44 events, so his win rate was a mightily impressive 80%. Similarly, in 2004 Robredo won 19 of 26 opening-round matches (73%) – another great record. These are key stats to look out for.
But for every Grosjean there is a Marat Safin or Max Mirnyi. These players are just as capable of winning an event as they are falling in the opening round and should be avoided, in their first match at least. To summarise, the trick is to back players who make a habit of only ever losing to opponents ranked above them.
The relevance of head-to-head records is often misjudged, which is surprising perhaps given that, read correctly, they can be the most direct gauges as to the outcome of a given match. They must be studied very carefully for anomalies such as Thomas Johansson’s eight consecutive wins over the vastly superior and now-retired Yevgeny Kafelnikov in the past decade – all too often punters fall foul of such historical records.
A supreme example of when to ignore a head-to-head record came at the 2003 US Open, where Jiri Novak faced a woefully out-of-form Jan-Michael Gambill in the second round. Gambill had won all three of the pair’s past meetings without dropping a set, but it was Novak who won this particular showdown, and in straight sets.
Useful head-to-head records are in fact a subset of a far greater tool of analysis, namely the match-up of styles. Arguably the world’s most successful tennis odds compiler, who has made more than half a million pounds from his own betting on the sport (and wishes to remain anonymous), has for years subscribed to the belief that players on the men’s tour can broadly be classed into five categories, with each head-to-head category eg. serve volleyer versus a defensive player) affecting the outcome of the match hugely.
As Tim Henman himself points out: ‘It’s important to take into consideration style of play and work out your opponents’ strengths and weaknesses.’ This is also relevant to the bettor when weighing up a match: if you fancy a certain player, you should consider his weaknesses and judge whether his opponent is capable of capitalising on them. All too often we see players suffer inexplicably one-sided defeats, often to lesser players in the first round
Greg Rusedski’s serve is good enough to win him a few matches at Wimbledon, thanks largely to the grass court incompetence of his early-round opponents. However, as soon as he comes up against someone capable of exploiting his woeful backhand, more often than not he loses (hence he has only once reached the quarter-finals).
There is almost no limit to how thorough, not to mention technical, one can get when analysing a tennis match. Environmental factors such as weather conditions, altitude and a player’s past record in the event in question are all subtle but nevertheless important pointers as to the outcome of a match.
Even more crucial is a player’s motivation in winning a given match. All too often we see players suffer inexplicably one-sided defeats, often to lesser players and usually in the first round of a smaller event.
Staying on the ball
Though there’s no suggestion that he didn’t try his utmost, only a fool would have backed Andre Agassi at long odds-on to beat Irakli Labadze in the first round of Shanghai – a tournament that offers players generous appearance fees – in 2001. It was the American’s first match since losing an epic US Open semi-final to Pete Sampras. Labadze duly won in straight sets.
Of course, we can profit from such occurrences. When a journeyman comes up against a hungry youngster towards the end of a gruelling season it is sometimes useful to ask: who wants to win more?
Another consideration is players’ fitness. No matter what the price, history has told us that it’s simply not worth backing a player in his first match back from injury. A professional will often rush back into action in a desperate attempt to stop his ranking from sliding. Some layers won’t even offer odds on a match involving a player who’s making his return from a long-term injury. Don’t ignore this practice – they’re not stupid.
Once one has learnt how to assess matchups, it’s useful to know when to do so. Grand Slam events, which feature a whopping 120 matches in each singles draw before the quarter-final stage, offer a plethora of mismatches and are the godsend of the favourites backer. Short-priced accumulators in the early rounds are always a safe bet.
One final area to consider is in-running betting, especially with Betfair. Layers overreact in the extreme to a break of serve early in the match, with a player’s odds regularly doubling if he drops serve within the opening few games. The shrewd punter will capitalise on this, and through doing the above-mentioned research, should have a fair idea of how likely the player is to break back. More about that next month.
For the 5 Golden Rules for match betting on tennis, plus a list of useful tennis resources, click the How To button.
