Posts Tagged tsonga
Tennis trading lessons
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on January 28th, 2010
A couple of neat lessons were served up by the Tennis yesterday and both showed that statistics don’t always give you the key to actually understanding what is going on in the underlying market.
First we had the Federer match. Struggling with a vibrant opponent and having lost 13 games in a row you could have counted Federer out for the count, but a revealing post match interview revealed what was going through his head at 2-6 1-3 down. Federer commented on how the sun was bothering him and how he couldn’t wait till it had cleared the court. He also, accidentally, revealed how he timed his ‘comfort break’ to allow him a chance to regain his thoughts and break the stride of his opponent. Unfortunately I was not around for this match so I missed this opportunity but it is amazing how a break in play can change things around.
Later than morning / evening we then had Djokovic seemingly in total control of a match only to get beaten from odds of 1.12. The explanation, Djokovic suddenly felt ill in the middle of the match. At the end of one energetic rally Djokovic bent over double at the end and looked up to his trainer. A few points later he was also off for a ‘comfort break’. He never managed to recover from feeling ill and it was an easy win for Tsonga in the end. I’ve captured the movement in odds from the moment he started to feel ill. Just goes to show it’s not only stats you should look out for in Tennis matches.
Federer crashes out
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on August 15th, 2009
With Nadal and Federer losing at the Montreal Masters, Andy Murray now has a great chance to pop up one place in the rankings to world number two.
Federer’s match was quite remarkable being two breaks up and 5-1 up in the final set, but still losing. Scott did a good post on the market on his blog. At 5-1 up in the final set I calculated his odds at 99.7% or basically 1.00, so no particular value at 1.01 to lay but Tsonga was priced at 370 on my spreadsheet. He was available to back at 500′s. Hindsight it a wonderful thing isn’t it! Even taking into account the price that still only represented a 0.3% chance of winning.
Interestingly, holding serve reduced those odds to 41, the break 32, another hold to 3.57. Just shows you that when a Tennis match swings it often does so in spectacular fashion.