Can you predict 1.01 defeats in Tennis?
Surface problems aside, the main news from Wimbledon so far was the shock’ defeat of Novak Djokovic.
Of course things are very easy in hindsight. But that said, short priced players are easily opposed when trading, more on that in a second . The thing that is surprising in these cases is to see somebody who traded near 1.01 before the off losing. That’s rare, but certainly not impossible.
1.01 Losers in Tennis
I shuffled through one of my database of matches and found 442 matches where the favourite started at 1.09 or lower and in that sample 15 players lost which was about right. One thing you can see when you look at most stats is that the market is remarkably efficient. Very often when people present stats that appear to show a bias, it could easily be just an aberration in that data set. Sometimes if you are looking for something, you may actually find it! When analysing data you need to carefully clean out every bias, including your own. The rule of thumb is that unless you can explain why the bias occurred, you may just be viewing an aberration in your sample set.
If we look at players around 2’s we found 1835 and the lose to win numbers were 921/914. So if a player starts with a implied chance of winning of 50%, un-remarkably, they tend to win around 50% of the time.
Trading vs Traditional betting
This is were people get confused, mis-understand or fail to see the appeal of trading. If you trade rather than place an outright bet, your win percentage should shoot up. Should, because you can actually get the underlying trading process wrong or fall into various psychological traps. Traps where an invisible hand will help you pull defeat out of the jaws of victory.
With this in mind, if you revisit the ‘shorties’ on the Tennis you quickly see a pattern develop. Sure they may win, but before they do it’s not uncommon for them to drift a bit, sometimes even lose. If you look at players trading 1.09 or less then they come in a bit, but there are few ticks left to profit in these cases. However, there is plenty of room above them. Therefore, on average, they drift around 14 ticks away from their start price. If you lay short priced favourite it’s perfectly possible to trade out for a profit. If your player is starts at 1.20 then it’s an evens chance they will drift to 1.50 at some point during the game.
It’s for this reason I’m always looking for a set up that benefits from a favourite under-performing or the price of the outsider to come in. While it’s difficult to predict a very short priced loser, it’s much easier to trade. While they may not lose, it’s quite likely they will drift at some point. Use Tennis trader in Bet Angel to find the exact point at which the price will start moving.
Therefore, Rain aside, Wimbledon is going much better than expected at the moment.
Category: Tennis, Trading strategies
