What are the best Betfair Tennis markets to trade?
Volatility in Tennis
Trading tennis markets is akin to selling volatility. While markets are generally priced efficiently before a match starts, the real opportunity lies in the journey each player takes from that point to closing out the match. Tennis, theoretically, can go on indefinitely, making its progression highly unpredictable. This inherent volatility provides fertile ground for traders, as straightforward victories are rare.
To illustrate, I analysed 60,000 recent matches. For matches with a starting price of 1.05, only 42% saw the odds drop without first fluctuating upwards. At starting odds of 1.10, this number falls to 20%. The higher the initial odds, the less likely the market is to move in a single direction. By understanding and capitalising on this volatility, traders can find numerous opportunities.
By strategically placing your trades at optimal points along this path, you can exploit these market movements. Our Tennis Trader tool was designed to help you visualise these paths, allowing you to decide the best moments to enter the market. This way, you can maximise your trading potential in the dynamic world of tennis.
Gender inequality surfaces
One effective method to refine your tennis trading strategy is to analyse matches by gender. The ability to win a point on serve varies significantly across different surface types and between male and female players. Understanding these nuances can greatly enhance your trading decisions.
Different surfaces impact players’ ability to hold serve. Here’s a breakdown:
- Grass is the easiest surface on which to win a point on serve. The fast-paced nature of grass courts means that serves are harder to return, leading to a higher likelihood of players holding serve.
- In contrast, clay is the most challenging surface for holding serve. The slower surface allows for more extended rallies and makes it easier for the receiving player to return serves, resulting in more breaks of serve.
- Hard courts offer a middle ground, with serve performance falling between that of grass and clay.
Gender also plays a crucial role in serve performance. Male and female players exhibit different tendencies in their ability to hold serve:
- Men generally have stronger serves, leading to a higher likelihood of holding serve, especially on faster surfaces like grass. This makes matches more predictable, with fewer breaks of serve.
- Women are less likely to hold serve compared to their male counterparts. This results in more breaks of serve and greater match variability, especially on slower surfaces like clay.
By splitting matches based on both gender and surface type, you can better predict match volatility and trading opportunities. For example:
- Men’s Matches on Grass: Expect fewer breaks of serve and more straightforward outcomes.
- Women’s Matches on Clay: Anticipate a higher degree of variability with more breaks of serve, leading to more trading opportunities as odds fluctuate.
My starting point
When I first started messing around with Tennis I did a simple thing. I would lay the favourite and offset it by a certain amount. My aim was to understand the average point in the market where the trade would hit a strike rate of 50%. I started low and went higher and higher and higher, till I the strike rate started to drop off. Once I achieved that I started looking at when that was reached and the score lines. From that, I was able to join up the mathematical model I had with the underlying activity in the market.
There is a direct correlation between the starting price and how variable the market is. Rather obviously, close competitive matches tend to produce the highest variability but even at shorter odds, the market can be pretty variable. But if you use the rule of thumb that opponents whose odds are closest together are more likely to produce highly variable matches you won’t go far wrong. It’s more complicated than that of course, but that’s a nice one line summary.
I found that by pitching the opening and closing orders in the market in advance I could break even at worse in the long run. All I needed to do was find precursors to that movement and / or make better selections to pull off a decent trade. It was also possible to repeat it in the same match as well. The benefit of this strategy is that the more unpredictable the match, the more you will benefit. Try and do more than one trade in a match, preferably lots. On the downside, if you pick badly, your loss is limited as long as you don’t chase it.
You will see quite a few matches that just result in a loss, there isn’t much you can do about that. But if you are actively trading the market when the winners come they will help offset those. When I tested the idea with £10 stakes over a large number of markets, it lost £5.21 on (small) stakes for a total staked of £1,800. A worthwhile expense to understand the structure of a market.
Entry and exit points
If you watch a typical Tennis match you will notice something. When the ball is in play there is little money at the touch price. It’s been common in Tennis for a long time that this is the default mode of operation. People don’t want to be picked off by people with faster feeds. So the money vanishes as the ball is about to be played. Fire up a market and watch yourself. Nobody plays ball when the ball is being played, which is quite sensible.
Therefore most Tennis traders will trade game to game, break to break or between key points. Exit trades are often placed in advance of the match reaching that point. Often, a potential break is all that is needed to bring a reward. So exits are pitched near that level.
Between each point, players get 25 seconds to compose themselves and serve. So if a potential break is on the cards, you get the chance to exit then without any play underway. Players like Nadal and Sharapova always use this period to the fullest extent. Sharapova always turns away from the opponent to stop them from speeding up the game. That 25 seconds has become tactical. You also have plenty of time between games and during the breaks or at the change of ends. There are many breaks in play in modern Tennis now, probably too many.
Anyhow, I’ve got terabytes of data and information on Tennis. If there is enough interest I can post up more facts and figures from various aspects of the game. But a lot of that is already encapsulated within Tennis trader inside Bet Angel Professional. This will allow you to experiment with and understand a lot of what I have said here, without having to sit through five hours of Tennis. It’s worth playing with if you want to get a deeper understanding of Tennis.