Month: November 2016

Forecasting the 2016 ATP World Tour Finals

Italian translation at settesei.it

Andy Murray is the #1 seed this week in London, but as I wrote for The Economist, Novak Djokovic likely remains the best player in the world. According to my Elo ratings, he would have a 63% chance of winning a head-to-head match between the two. And with the added benefit of an easier round-robin draw, the math heavily favors Djokovic to win the tournament.

Here are the results of a Monte Carlo simulation of the draw:

Player        SF      F      W  
Djokovic   95.3%  73.9%  54.6%  
Murray     86.3%  58.3%  29.7%  
Nishikori  60.4%  24.9%   7.8%  
Raonic     50.9%  16.3%   3.3%  
Wawrinka   29.4%   7.8%   1.6%  
Monfils    33.2%   8.7%   1.4%  
Cilic      23.9%   5.8%   1.1%  
Thiem      20.7%   4.1%   0.5%

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player favored so heavily to progress out of the group stage. Murray’s 86% chance of doing so is quite high in itself; Novak’s 95% is otherworldly. His head-to-heads against the other players in his group are backed up by major differences in Elo points–Dominic Thiem is a lowly 15th on the Elo list, given only a 7.4% chance of beating the Serb.

If Milos Raonic is unable to compete, Djokovic’s chances climb even higher. Here are the probabilities if David Goffin takes Raonic’s place in the bracket:

Player        SF      F      W  
Djokovic   96.8%  75.2%  55.4%  
Murray     86.2%  60.7%  30.6%  
Nishikori  60.7%  26.3%   8.1%  
Monfils    47.7%  12.4%   1.8%  
Wawrinka   29.3%   8.5%   1.7%  
Cilic      23.8%   6.2%   1.1%  
Thiem      29.5%   5.8%   0.7%  
Goffin     26.0%   4.9%   0.5%

The luck of the draw was on Novak’s side. I ran another simulation with Djokovic and Murray swapping groups. Here, Djokovic is still heavily favored to win the tournament, but Murray’s semifinal chances get a sizable boost:

Player        SF      F      W  
Djokovic   92.8%  75.1%  54.9%  
Murray     90.9%  58.1%  29.8%  
Nishikori  58.4%  26.9%   7.5%  
Raonic     52.3%  14.3%   3.3%  
Wawrinka   26.9%   8.4%   1.6%  
Monfils    35.3%   7.5%   1.4%  
Cilic      21.9%   6.2%   1.0%  
Thiem      21.6%   3.4%   0.5%

Elo rates Djokovic so highly that he is favored no matter what the draw. But the draw certainly helped.

Doubles!

I’ve finally put together a sufficient doubles dataset to generate Elo ratings and tournament forecasts for ATP doubles. While I’m not quite ready to go into detail, I can say that, by using the Elo algorithm and rating players individually, the resulting forecasts outperform the ATP rankings about as much as singles Elo ratings do.

Here is the forecast for the doubles event at the World Tour Finals:

Team               SF      F      W  
Herbert/Mahut   76.4%  49.5%  32.1%  
Bryan/Bryan     68.7%  36.8%  19.9%  
Kontinen/Peers  55.7%  29.1%  13.8%  
Dodig/Melo      58.4%  28.1%  13.2%  
Murray/Soares   48.3%  20.8%   8.6%  
Lopez/Lopez     37.7%  16.4%   6.2%  
Klaasen/Ram     30.2%  11.9%   4.0%  
Huey/Mirnyi     24.6%   7.3%   2.2%

This distribution is more like what round-robin forecasts usually look like, without a massive gap between the top of the field and the rest. Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut are the top rated team, followed closely by Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan. Max Mirnyi was, at his peak, one of the highest Elo-rated doubles players, but his pairing with Treat Huey is the weakest of the bunch.

The men’s doubles bracket has some legendary names, along with some players–like Herbert and Henri Kontinen–who may develop into all-time greats, but it has no competitors who loom over the rest of the field like Murray and Djokovic do in singles.

How To Keep Round Robin Matches Interesting, Part Two

Italian translation at settesei.it

Earlier this week, I published a deep dive into the possible outcomes of four-player round robin groups and offered an ideal schedule that would minimize the likelihood of dead rubbers on the final day. I’ve since heard from a few readers who pointed out two things:

  1. You might do better if you determined the schedule for day two after getting the results of the first two matches.
  2. Major tournaments such as the ATP and WTA Tour Finals already do this, pairing the winners of the first two matches and the losers of the first two matches on day two.

This is an appealing idea. You’re guaranteed to end the second day with one undefeated (2-0) player, two competitors at 1-1, and the last at 0-2. The two participants at 1-1 have everything to play for, and depending on day three’s schedule and tiebreak factors, the 0-2 player could still be in the running as well.

Best of all, you avoid the nightmare scenario of two undefeated players and two eliminated players, in which the final two matches are nearly meaningless.

However, this “contingent schedule” approach isn’t perfect.

Surprise, surprise

We learned in my last post that, if we set the entire schedule before play begins, the likelihood of a dead rubber on the final day is 17%, and if we choose the optimal schedule, leaving #4 vs #1 and #3 vs #2 for the final day, we can drop those chances as low as 10.7%.

(These were based on a range of player skill levels equivalent to 200 points on the Elo scale. The bigger the range of player skills–for instance, the ATP finals is likely to have a group with a range well over 300–the more dramatic the differences in these numbers.)

In addition, we discovered that “dead/seed” matches–those in which one player is already eliminated and the other can only affect their semifinal seeding–are even more common. When the schedule is chosen in advance, the probability of a dead rubber or a “dead/seed” match is always near 40%.

If the day two schedule is determined by day one outcomes, the overall likelihood of these “mostly meaningless” (dead or “dead/seed”) matches drops to about 30%. That’s a major step in the right direction.

Yet there is a drawback: The chances of a dead rubber increase! With the contingent day two schedule, there is a roughly 20% chance of a completely meaningless match on day three.

Our intuition should bear this out. After day two, we are guaranteed one 2-0 player and one 0-2 player. It is somewhat likely that these two have faced each other already, but there still remains a reasonable chance they will play on day three. If they do, the 0-2 player is already eliminated–there will be two 2-1 players at the end of day three. The 2-0 player has clinched a place in the semifinals, so the most that could be at stake is a semifinal seeding.

In other words, if the “winner versus winner” schedule results in a 2-0 vs 0-2 matchup on day three, the odds are that it’s meaningless. And this schedule often does just that.

The ideal contingent schedule

If the goal is to avoid dead rubbers at all costs, the contingent schedule is not for you. You can do a better job by properly arranging the schedule in advance. However, a reasonable person might prefer the contingent schedule because it completely avoids the risk of the low-probability “nightmare scenario” that I described above, of two mostly meaningless day three matches.

Within the contingent schedule, there’s still room for optimization. If the day one slate consists of matches setting #1 against #3 and #2 against #4 (sorted by ranking), the probability of a meaningless match on day three is about average. If day one features #1 vs #2 and #3 vs #4, the odds are even higher: about a 21% chance of a dead rubber and another 11% chance of a “dead/seed” match.

That leaves us with the optimal day one schedule of #1 vs #4 and #2 vs #3. It lowers the probability of a dead rubber to 19% and the chances of a “dead/seed” match to 9.7%. Neither number represents a big difference, but given all the eyes on every match at major year-end events, it seems foolish not to make a small change in order to maximize the probability that both day three matches will matter.