Predicting Tennis Matches with Bet Angel
Using statistics in sport
I’ve always believed that adding more statistics to a sport enhances the experience. Take horse racing, for example – it’s largely devoid of stats, making it challenging for newcomers to grasp what they’re seeing.
On the other hand, tennis is a goldmine for sports trading, packed with a wealth of data and statistics. This abundance of information is perfect for in-depth analysis. For sports traders, especially those focused on tennis, using data to inform your trading strategy is invaluable. With the right predictions, you can effectively plan your entry points, exit points, and overall trade positions.
Back in the day, I used to spend countless hours gathering data myself, striving to gain deeper insights into various sports. Nowadays, however, this data is readily available, saving time and providing a massive advantage. This accessibility of information is a game-changer for the betting and trading community, offering incredible value when used correctly.
When I first started developing tennis trading strategies, I knew I had to understand the core elements and how they influenced match outcomes. Constantly reacting to events puts you behind the curve. To be a successful trader, you need to anticipate the action and stay ahead of what’s coming next. By leveraging data and statistics, you can position yourself to predict and capitalize on market movements more effectively.
Tennis models and modelling tools
I set out to model tennis to predict future price movements and anticipate them effectively. This involves making judgment calls on potential outcomes to identify profitable trading opportunities. For instance, if you’re laying players, you need to know which scenarios are likely to lead to a profitable trade.
Tennis Trader is a sophisticated model designed to do just that. We’ve made it user-friendly, but here, I’ll demonstrate how Tennis Trader integrates with data from the Tennis tour sites and other sources to enhance accuracy even further.
To illustrate how the model is built and how to use statistics with Tennis Trader, I’ll walk you through some WTA stats. This will show you how to leverage published data to achieve more precise results and improve your trading strategy.
Gathering Tennis statistics
I’ve ranked the women players here by their world ranking you can see Osaka is number one when I captured this image. 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.
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.
How the Tennis Trader model works
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.
Calibrating the Tennis model
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 visualize how a mere 1% difference in skill between players can impact an entire match with Tennis Trader. It’s astounding to see how a small pre-match skill gap can result in a wide variation by the end of the match.
Tennis Trader offers a semi-intelligent mode that does most of the heavy lifting for you. It correlates the setup you’ve given it, including the score and the players’ skills, to provide a clear picture of how the match is likely to unfold. This feature alone gives you a great sense of the match dynamics.
For those who prefer a hands-on approach, Tennis Trader allows you to build your own model. By gathering data from ATP and WTA sites, you can input your own numbers and let Tennis Trader process them for you. This flexibility lets you tailor the model to your specific insights and predictions.
Using the calibration tool to ‘play around’ with the difference between players, will give you a much better understanding of how odds move in a Tennis match. As the match progresses, just a small change in performance can have a signficant impact on the odds.
Using this method of predicting a Tennis match will allow you to see what the odds are telling you and also how that could change.
Regardless of how you use it, Tennis Trader is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s perfect for training on tennis and stands out as one of our best creations. Mastering Tennis Trader will revolutionize the way you trade tennis, whether you’re focusing on matches like Wimbledon, the Australian Open, the French Open, or other Grand Slams.