Italian translation at settesei.it
Last week during the second round of US Open qualifying, Gerald Melzer battled through a 28-point service game–that’s eleven deuces–en route to defeating Kenny De Schepper. (Perhaps mentally exhausted, he lost the next day to Felix Auger-Aliassime.) Watching the scoreboard from a nearby court, I assumed it had malfunctioned and the match was long over.
Such marathon games are rare, but they aren’t unheard of. Yesterday, another qualifier, Lloyd Harris, needed ten deuces to hang on to one game against Gilles Simon in their first round match. Neither Melzer’s nor Harris’s tally are close to the record, which is likely still a 28-deuce game in a 1996 contest between Alberto Berasategui and Marcelo Filippini. That’s 62 points–one point more than the legendary 28-minute full match between Bernard Tomic and Jarkko Nieminen. The entire match. An even longer game, spanning 37 deuces and 80 points, took place at the non-tour-sanctioned Surrey Championships in 1975.
The odds on paper
On the ATP tour, the server wins about 63% of points. In the last year, Melzer has won roughly 64%, about the same as De Schepper’s opponents, so we’ll use the slightly higher number. With a server winning 64% of points, the odds of reaching deuce are 24.4%. After that, the chances of getting to another deuce are a bit less than half, or 46.1%. The odds of an at-least-two-deuce game are 24.4% times 46.1%, the odds of an at-least-three-deuce game are 24.4% times 46.1% times 46.1%, and so on. Melzer’s eleven-deuce game is 24.4% times (46.1% ^ 10), a little bit better than one in ten thousand. The match required 30 games, so the chances of a 28-point game (or longer) at some point–assuming the underlying numbers are the same for De Schepper’s service games–are roughly 30 times better, one in three hundred.
The Simon-Harris 26-pointer is even more likely. On the challenger tour, Harris has won nearly 65% of his service points, while Simon wins better than 40% of return points against tougher competition. Combining those numbers to account for competition is beyond the scope of this post, but let’s say Harris was expected to win 61% of his service points. (He ended up winning only half, though that overall rate is heavily influenced by the marathon game.) The odds of any individual Harris service game lasting 26 points, assuming a 61% serve win rate, is about one in three thousand.
One last example: The Berasategui-Filippini record-setter was primed for some long games, as neither player won very many serve points, and the Casablanca clay has never been speedy. But even with favorable circumstances, 28 deuces is nearly impossible. Using a service points won rate of 58% for Filippini (he won 59.6% that year, while Berasategui’s opponents won 57.7%, and I’ve rounded down a tiny bit for the surface), the odds of an individual game lasting at least 62 points are nearly one in one billion.
Delayed toilet breaks
Let’s see how well the odds predict the real-life frequency of marathon games. In my database of about 435,000 tour-level games back to 2012, 42 games reached the 28-point mark, a rate of approximately one per ten thousand–the same as the theoretical number we saw for Melzer-De Schepper. Many of the games terminated after 28 points, and none went longer than 36 points. The most recent 36-pointer was in this year’s Australian Open third round, when Kyle Edmund broke Nikoloz Basilashvili’s serve (and his spirit) to take a 2-0 lead in the fourth set.
28-pointers–and long games in general–are a bit more common on the challenger tour. I found 81 in about 600,000 games–about one per 7,500 games–including three 38-pointers. Edmund figured in one of those prolonged games, barely failing to break Grega Zemlja’s serve at the 2016 Dallas Challenger. Melzer appears in the list as well, having fought through 28 points to hold against Robin Haase in the 2015 Trnava Challenger, though he ended up losing the match.
Theory and practice also match when we look at WTA data. Using a tour-average rate of service points won of 58%, we would expect to see a 28-pointer once every 4,600 games or so. In 367,000 recorded games, I found 89 instances, or one per 4,100. The record here outstrips anything in the last few years of ATP or Challenger data: Mathilde Johansson broke Elena Vesnina on the 40th point, after 17 deuces. She consolidated the break to win the second set, but dropped the decider.
Based on the last several years of data, Berasategui’s and Filippini’s record appears to be safe. Given the efforts to speed up the game, in which tennis executives would prefer no-ad to Berasategui’s brand of 28-ad, that’s probably for the best.