Today I was enamored with the FiveThirtyEight.com article, Inside the Shadowy World of High-Speed Tennis Betting. The article mentions the courtsiders who would sit court side at a tennis match and try to relay information quicker than the tournament computers to betting partners. Great read. Not sure these courtsiders were really doing anything illegal.
Buried deep in the article was a mention of the system this one organization created to predict the outcome of tennis matches for betting purposes. It links to a website, Summer of Jeff, and a post, Python Code for Tennis Markov. If you follow the links to the gitHub site, there is some pretty elaborate Python code for generating probabilities based on Markov Chain theory. The code is pretty easy to use, if you understand Python and statistics, although it needs some cleaning up if you plan on using it for entire match prediction (hint: the matchProbs function needs some fixes to run).
The biggest issue is determining the initial probabilities. You need to create each server’s probability to win a point.
To do this, I decided to hit the trusty ATPworldtour.com website and pulled that information up.
FEDERER-TURSUNOV
For the year Roger Federer has won 90% of all service games, but only 70% of his service points. On clay this season, he is 89% and 67%. On the other hand, Dmitry Tursunov has won 22% of return games and 36% of return points. On clay he is 24% and 37%. Assuming the majority of these results came from ‘inferior’ players, we might suggest that these numbers regress to each other. I am going to say that Federer is likely to win 65% of his service points. One down.
Now when Tursunov serves, he’s won 75% of service games and 61 of service points, 70%-60% on clay. Federer has won 29% of service return games and 41% of points, 27%-40% on clay. That seems to work out quite nicely to 60-40, so Federer’s return probability will be 40%.
Plugging this into the handy code mentioned above, we get that Federer is a 78.5% favorite to win tomorrow.
TSONGA-JANOWICZ
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga has won 68% of service points, 65% on clay, while Jerzy Janowicz has won 34% of return points all season and an improved 36% on clay. What is crazy about this is you might suggest that Janowicz is a better clay court than hard court player. Well, amazingly, he had not won a single clay court match this spring before winning his first two rounds at Roland Garros. Oh well. I am still going to give his the benefit and place Tsonga as 65% to win a point on serve.
Returning, Tsonga has been 34% for the year and 35% on clay, while Janowicz has won 62% on serve and 68% on clay. Again Janowicz stats are much better on the terre battue. I am going to just split this straight and leave Tsonga’s return percentage at 34%.
We all know the French crowd will be pulling for their man, so that may be the edge, however, the stats say that Janowicz looks to be a slight favorite at 56.1%. Moving Tsonga’s serve percentage up just a point makes this a dead heat.
THE ODDS
Looking at the odds at SportsBook.com, Federer is -2500, so that’s a ridiculous bet, but Janowicz is actually +325 v. Tsonga, so that may be worth a play. I hope to look into this more as the tournament progresses.