Tennis Spread Betting

May 2004. It’s a beautiful spring evening in Paris. Two Frenchmen, Arnaud Clement and Fabrice Santoro, may be across the net from one another but in reality they’re standing toe-to-toe. Nothing can separate them as the best-of-five-sets match is suspended overnight with the score at 5-5 in the final set.

For punters who bought total games, the world is a wonderful place; for those who sold, it’s going to be a long night. Eventually, after six hours and 33 minutes – the longest match of the modern era – Santoro triumphs. Total games make up at 71.

Never has there been a clearer example of the rewards of spread betting on tennis: like with other sports, when spread betting the more right you are, the more you win. Of course, the more wrong you are, the more you lose, but the diligent bettor can use his knowledge of the game to cash in.

‘The beauty of tennis spread betting is that you can assess all bets on their merits and there is no such thing as a bad market,’ one former tennis trader, who’s now one of the most successful fixed odds compilers on the sport, told InsideEdge on condition of anonymity.

The most important principle in tennis spread betting applies to all sports: selling is the easiest route to profit. Additionally, there’s no such thing as a market to avoid. The specials that fixed-odds bookmakers offer are, more often than not, a complete waste of time and money. Conversely, specials markets in tennis spread betting can be hugely profitable.

Spready cash

Unlike in fixed-odds tennis betting, spreads offer a veritable suite of markets. Unfortunately, not all the firms price up tournament performance indices for regular tour events – the otherwise excellent Sporting Index don’t even frame this market for Masters Series events – but they definitely will for Wimbledon and there are often brilliant opportunities for shrewd sellers. According to the aforementioned former tennis trader, ‘at every tournament each player is about three points too high.’

The way to capitalise on this is to identify the big names that are out of form and sell. Laying players on the exchanges is an alternative to selling them on the spreads, but the latter involves less risk for a reasonable payout.

For example, if you don’t think Joachim Johansson is going to perform very well at Wimbledon you would have to lay a hefty amount on the exchanges given that his price is likely to be at least 14/1. Selling his tournament performance with a spread firm is a more sensible option. Like the outright indices, the ‘best European’ or ‘best rest of world’ markets, which again are unique to spread betting on tennis, offer this same opportunity to sell.

Is buying ever a good option? Well, yes – but the best advice is to be speculative and focus on those players who have been given artificially low quotes. It is easy to get burned, for example, by buying one of the favourites who goes on to lose early, like Roger Federer did at last year’s French Open.

Betting successfully on the matches themselves requires considerable time and effort. You can bet on match supremacy (Sporting and Spreadex award 10 points for winning the match and five points for each set won; IG and Cantor give three points for each set and 10 for the match), game supremacy (the number of games a player wins by), total games (total number of games in a match) and X-Courts (multiply the games in each set and then add them up, e.g. 6-3, 6-2 = 6 x 3 + 6 x 2 = 30).

In all markets, selling is the easiest way to profit. Just like in football, where the majority of punters buy total goals – probably in order to increase their enjoyment of a live game, tennis bettors prefer to buy total games and X-Courts, and the prices reflect this. You must not be afraid to sell, which of course means that you begin the match in the best possible position and your profits decrease with each game won.

Setting the records straight

One situation that can be especially advantageous to sellers is when two clay court or defensive players face off. Quotes for total games and X-Courts are almost always set too high, with traders believing that the two will toil all day long. In reality, these match-ups are usually decided in straight sets. In fact, no matter how evenly matched two players may be, the statistics illustrate that straight sets scorelines occur far more frequently than final-set duels.

X-Courts and total games are closely related, but the former is more volatile and, if there’s any market to avoid, it’s this. Match supremacy most resembles fixed-odds betting and bettors should compare the two before calculating which offers better value in a given contest. Similarly, it’s often advantageous to bet in-running on the fixed-odds exchanges than to dabble in live spread betting.

Game supremacy, if played properly, can lead to some handsome wins. Again, proper analysis is essential. Players’ styles must be considered, with strength of serve and quality of return games being the two key factors. Throughout his career Pete Sampras’ game supremacy quotes were often set higher than they should’ve been because traders looked at match performance quotes and translated them to game supremacy without factoring in his style.

Sampras had one of the best service game records of any player, but his return game record wasn’t as prolific as some of his peers and he would often be content with just one break in each set, ie winning 6-3 or 6-4, producing a relatively small game supremacy make-up. Conversely, more explosive players, such as Federer, win by much bigger margins because of their style of play. These trends must be spotted and acted upon.

Do the groundwork first

Traders’ limited knowledge of the sport, not to mention their time constraints, are often exposed in ‘specials’ markets. For example, when putting up prices for total aces in a match, traders will usually just look at how many aces the two players hit, when an equally important variable is how many the two players concede. This information is available on most tournament websites, but does require you to trawl through each match – there’s no shortcut, more’s the pity.

Another area of traders’ knowledge, or lack of it, that we can exploit is in women’s tennis. The huge majority of spread bets struck on tennis are on the men’s game. Because of this, traders don’t have the time or inclination to follow the women’s game so closely and so rely almost exclusively on statistics. If you can identify anomalies such as those described above, you are on the right track.