Benoit Paire and Overqualified Challenger Contenders

Italian translation at settesei.it

With three ATP tour-level events on the slate this week, Benoit Paire considered his options and elected to play none of them. Instead, the world #23 is the top seed at the Brest Challenger, making him the highest ranked player to enter a challenger this year–by a wide margin.

Top-50 players may only enter challengers if they are given a wild card, and top-ten players may not enter them at all. Still, since 1990, a top-50 player has played a challenger just over 500 times, at a rate of about 20 per year. (Some of these players didn’t need a wild card, as entry is determined by ranking several weeks before the tournament, during which time rankings rise and fall.)

Many of the high-ranked wild cards fall into one of two categories: Players who lose early in Slams, Indian Wells, or Miami; and clay-court specialists seeking more matches on dirt. Paire’s decision this week–like the Frenchman himself–doesn’t follow one of these common patterns.

Anyway, here are the top-ranked players to contest challengers since 1990, along with their results. A result of “W” means that the player won the title, while any other result indicates the round in which the player lost.

Year  Event           Player               Rank  Result  
2003  Braunschweig    Rainer Schuettler    8     R16     
1991  Johannesburg    Petr Korda           9     SF      
1994  Barcelona       Alberto Berasategui  10    W       
1994  Graz            Alberto Berasategui  11    R16     
2008  Sunrise         Fernando Gonzalez    12    QF      
2004  Luxembourg      Joachim Johansson    12    W       
2011  Prostejov       Mikhail Youzhny      13    QF      
2008  Prostejov       Tomas Berdych        13    QF      
2003  Prague          Sjeng Schalken       13    W       
2005  Zagreb          Ivan Ljubicic        14    W       
2004  Bratislava      Dominik Hrbaty       14    F       
2004  Prostejov       Jiri Novak           14    QF      
2003  Prostejov       Jiri Novak           14    R32     
2007  Dnepropetrovsk  Guillermo Canas      15    SF      
2002  Prostejov       Jiri Novak           15    F       
1998  Segovia         Alberto Berasategui  15    QF      
1997  Braunschweig    Felix Mantilla       15    F       
1997  Zagreb          Alberto Berasategui  15    W

(Schuettler and Korda were outside the top ten a couple of weeks before their respective challengers.)

A look at this list suggests that Alberto Berasategui entered challengers as a top-fifty player more than anyone else. He’s close–with 12 such entries, he’s tied for second with Jordi Arrese. The player who dropped down a level the most times is Dominik Hrbaty, who played 17 challengers while ranked in the top 50. (The active leaders are Jarkko Nieminen with ten and Andreas Seppi with nine.)

Despite all those attempts, Hrbaty wasn’t particularly successful as a high-ranked challenger player. He won only 2 of those 17 events, reaching only one other final. Top-50 players aren’t guaranteed to win these titles, of course, but in general, they have outperformed Hrbaty, winning 18% of possible titles. Here are top-50 players’ results broken down by round:

Result       Frequency  
Title            18.1%  
Loss in F         9.3%  
Loss in SF       11.3%  
Loss in QF       17.1%  
Loss in R16      22.0%  
Loss in R32      22.2%

Paire is a better player than this sample’s average ranking of 37. Combined with a favorable surface, he gets a much more optimistic forecast from my algorithm, with a slightly better than one-in-three chance of winning the title. With a futures title, an ATP trophy, and a pair of challenger triumphs already in the books this year, it seems fitting that Benoit would add another oddity to his wide-ranging season.

Following up on Beta’s comment below, I looked at how top fifty players compare to other ranking groups in each challenger round. Here’s how it breaks down by round (the same as shown above):

Ranking     L in R32  L in R16  L in QF  L in SF  L in F  Title  
1 to 50          22%       22%      17%      11%      9%    18%  
51 to 100        31%       23%      17%      12%      7%    10%  
101 to 150       39%       23%      16%      10%      5%     6%  
151 to 200       44%       26%      15%       8%      4%     4%  
201 to 250       49%       26%      13%       6%      3%     2%

The top fifties are significantly better than the next level or two down in only two rounds: the first round and final. It may be that when top players show up, they just want a bit of match practice, so they really care about getting some confidence from a first-round win. After that, perhaps they don’t want to wear themselves out. If they’ve reached the final, it may be a sign that they’re particularly invested in the tournament’s outcome, and that they will continue to play according.

Here’s another way of looking at the numbers–won-loss record in each round:

Ranking       R32    R16     QF     SF      F  
1 to 50     77.7%  71.5%  69.2%  70.8%  65.9%  
51 to 100   69.0%  66.9%  62.2%  58.5%  57.1%  
101 to 150  60.7%  61.5%  57.2%  54.9%  53.9%  
151 to 200  55.9%  53.5%  50.7%  49.7%  47.8%  
201 to 250  50.9%  48.3%  46.4%  45.8%  46.8%

I’m a bit surprised that the percentages for each group don’t go down more dramatically by round. Of course, for the most common groups (ranks 100 through 250), there are plenty of matches between players ranked in the same group, pushing those percentages toward 50%. Still, the small differences in some of these results reflects just how even challenger-level fields can be.