Predicting Tennis Matches with Bet Angel

I’ve always argued that adding more statistics to a sport makes it more enjoyable. If you look at horse racing, it’s bereft of statistics and it’s difficult if you are not ‘into’ horse racing, to know exactly what you are looking at.

Tennis markets are one of those great sports trading markets where there is a plethora of data and statistics available to you. That means that it is prime for detailed analysis. Using data to position yourself in trade is so valuable, especially if you are a sports trader looking to trade Tennis. Rustling up some Tennis predictions will allow you to frame a trade well and manage your, entry point, exit point and overall trade positions.

Many years ago, I used to have to collect data which wasted enormous amounts of time but I did it, trying to get to the next level of what I could see within a sport. However, as a sports trader now, all of this data is just presented to you on a plate so if you are looking for tennis betting tips you will find them. In fact I don’t think that when people published this sort of data that they realised what they’re doing to help the betting and trading community because this absolutely invaluable, if it’s used in the correct way.

So when I was looking at trying to crack the puzzle that was tennis trading strategies, I knew I needed to get to some of the core values, I needed to understand exactly what it was that I was looking at and how that would influence the outcome of the event. If you’re reacting to stuff constantly, you’re always going to be behind the curve. What you need to do as a profitable trader is to be ahead of the action and in front of what is about to happen.

Tennis trader – The Tennis modelling tool

I wanted to model tennis to allow me to understand where the price is going to be at some point in the future and then anticipate that. Essentially to make a judgment call on whether I think that something is going to happen to asses trading opportunities – that’s how you profit on tennis. If you are laying players you want to know what scenarios would likely lead to a profitable Tennis trade.

Tennis Trader is a very complicated model which allows you to do that. We have made it to be very user-friendly, but what I’m going to do for you here is to show you how Tennis Trader ties in with data that you see published on ATP tour sites and so on and how you can put that into Tennis trader to allow you to get even more accurate results.

To understand how the model is created and show you how you can use statistics with Tennis Trader I am going to talk through some of the WTA stats.

Gathering Tennis statistics

The WTA site is where you can find all of the women’s stats. For people who aren’t into tennis, ATP is the association of tennis professionals (the men’s game) and WTA’s Women’s Tennis Association (the women’s game). Different websites, similar stats they obviously converge in terms of the stats that everybody’s looking at.

I’ve ranked the women players here by their world ranking you can see Osaka is number one at the moment you can see that she gets about 60% of her serves in and wins about 71% of those serves she does get in. If you actually look down this list of service percentages, they’re a bit weaker than the men, so this is where gender comes into play. Men tend to be able to serve much harder and faster and tend to be a bit stronger. Often, they tend to be taller as well, height is a huge advantage in tennis because you can get more height on the ball and you can hit it harder over the net which makes it more difficult to return.

Women’s tennis tends to be a little bit more competitive and less predictable than the men’s and especially if you start talking about different surfaces etc. You tend to get more volatility when you’re looking at the women’s game because breaks of serve occur more frequently that’s the net upshot of what we’re looking at within here.

If we look at the return percentages, you can see the return percentages, as I just indicated, are much higher. Again, being able to return a serve increases the chance of winning a point and increasing chance of winning the point increases your chance of breaking serve. This is why the women’s tennis tends to be slightly better to trade than the men’s because the men’s is a bit ‘boom bash’, using a lot of regression to try and win a point, whereas the women’s game is a little bit more uncertain. You can see the chance of returning a serve is actually a little bit higher overall.

If you want to see more of this, I have shown this on some of the videos that I’ve done previously

What I’m trying to do at this point in the blog is show you where these stats are what they reveal, then you can do your own set of analysis on it from there. These are the sort of stats that I tend to look at, there’s infinite layers of depth you can go to but I’m not going to do that in this blog as it would take far too long.

These stats should give you a clue as to how good players are at serving and returning a serve and it’s worth checking them out if you’re going to analyse a match properly. It may give you a bit of an indication on:

• How the match could play out
• How competitive it will be
• Whether there’s a good chance of a break of serve occurring at some point within the match

Have a look at these sites if you want to get underneath the skin of a lot of these tennis matches.

Using Tennis trader to set up your Betfair trading

The way that Tennis Trader is constructed is it’s looking at the odds within a match. This match is fairly even and now Tennis Traders job is to:

• Look at the odds
• Compare this to all of the matches that we’ve seen
• The type of match that we’re looking at
• Calculate out percentages
• What the implied percentage is that either of these players is going to win a point

That’s how Tennis Trader is constructed, using the stats like the ones you have seen above. Tennis Trader has been developed into a model and it monitors every single path that could happen within the match. It starts with the first service game, then works out the probabilities of that and then it comes up with a price for you and all the price movements that could occur over the rest of the match.

When you first go in and you use Tennis Trader you need to click on the ‘calibrate’ button and what that does is looks at the odds, it looks at the score and it comes up with a route figure to calculate all of the data. However, did you know that you can modify that yourself.

What’s Tennis Trader is doing is plotting a path with every conceivable point within the match that could occur, when players have a set percentage. So the calibrate tool basically looks at the odds looks, players and the match and then works out what that percentage is. From that it can work out what the chance of winning a point, winning the first set etc.

Next to the calibrate button, you will see that there’s a little spanner and if you click on that spanner it brings up a dialog box.

It says ‘calibrate with the seed value of…’. 0.65 is the win on serve percentage visible on the WTA and ATP sites, so the software is saying it’s going to look at 65%, look at these two players and then calculate out from that seed percentage as close as I can to your seed value the difference in skill between these two players. It will then calculate the value from there.

You can actually directly manipulate the output from tennis trader and the best way to demonstrate this is to use fixed calibration values. If you’re an experienced tennis trader and you’re using all sorts of data and stats to look at a match or you’ve done loads of epic research before a match starts and you want to input that into the model, you can use Tennis Trader as a calculating engine. For example, if I do a fixed calibration and we think both of them are going to win on serve 70% of the time and we apply that then can you see what it does to the score.

Now Tennis Trader is saying there’s an equal chance of either player winning this particular match. Basically because we’re saying that both players are absolutely equal in every respect, they both win a point on serve at the same rate as they can return and they cancel each other out and therefore they’re exactly equal.

If I redo this calibration now and then put one player 1% lower and apply it again then what you will see is how that changes.

You can actually propagate out what that 1% in the difference in skill would have across the entire match and you can actually see that beautifully presented for you on Tennis Trader. You will be amazed how a small skill difference pre match can lead to such a wide variation when the match is over.

So, you can use tennis trader in its semi-intelligent mode, where it tries to do all of that for you. It will try and correlate the setup you’ve given it, the score and the skill of the players and it roughly works that out. This will give you a really good idea of the way the match is generally set up.

If you want to be more specific you can actually do that all yourself. You would go to the ATP and the WTA sites to build your own model in terms of how you think those two numbers are going to interact with each other, then you can just plug them in to tennis trader and it will do all of that for you.

But whichever way you use it it’s a really powerful tool it’s perfect for training on tennis it’s one of the best bits of work that we’ve done and you should absolutely learn to use it will completely transform the way that you trade tennis, whether you enjoy trading matches like Wimbledon, The Australian Open, The French Open or Grand Slam’s.