Italian translation at settesei.it
In a typical week, no one would notice if Fabio Fognini, Karen Khachanov, and Lucas Pouille combined to go 0-3. This week is different, as those three men held the top seeds at the ATP events in Cordoba, Sofia, and Montpellier. After their first-round byes, each of them lost in the second round, to Aljaz Bedene, Matteo Berrettini, and Marcos Baghdatis, respectively. At least two of the top seeds pushed their opponents to three sets, while Fognini lasted only 71 minutes.
This is not the first time a trio of number one seeds have suffered first-match upsets in the same week. Amazingly, it’s not even the first such occurrence in this very week on the calendar. Two years ago, when the South American event was played in Quito, the results were the same: top seeds Marin Cilic, Ivo Karlovic, and Dominic Thiem all failed to win a match. Thiem’s vanquisher, Nikoloz Basilashvili, even extended the streak the following week, heading to Memphis and handing Karlovic his second straight second-round ouster.
Predictable upsets?
Focusing on these losses, it’s natural to wonder whether top seeds are particularly fragile in this sort of tournament. There’s certainly a logic to it. The number one seed at an ATP 250 is usually ranked in the top 20, and is the sort of player who might have considered taking the week off. He knows that more ranking points are available at slams and Masters, so winning a smaller event isn’t his highest priority. His opponent, on the other hand, is competing every chance he gets, and the points on offer at a smaller event could make a big difference in his standing. Further, he has already played–and won–his first-round match, so he might be performing better than usual, or the conditions might suit him particularly well.
Let’s put it to the test. Since 2010, not counting this week’s carnage, I found 267 non-Masters events at which a top seed got a first-round bye and completed his second-round match. (Additionally, there have been three retirements and one withdrawal; only one of those resulted in a loss for the top seed.) The number one seeds had a median rank of 10, and the underdogs had a median rank of 89. Based on my surface-weighted Elo ratings at the time of each match, the favorites should have won 81.5% of the time. That’s better than this week’s trio of top-seeded losers, who were 64% (Fognini), 80% (Khachanov), and 69% (Pouille) favorites.
As it happened, the unseeded challengers were more successful than expected. The favorites won only 76.8% of those matches–a rate low enough that there is only a 3% probability it is due to chance alone. It’s not an overwhelming effect–certainly not enough that we should have predicted this week’s results–but it seems that a few of the top seeds are showing up unmotivated and a handful of the underdogs are playing better than expected.
Riding the wave
What about the underdog winners? Once they’ve defeated the top seed, how many capitalize on the opportunity? Berrettini came back to beat Fernando Verdasco in his quarter-final match today, while Baghdatis and Bedene play later. My forecasts believe that, of the three, Bedene has the best chance of claiming a title, though still less than a one-in-five shot at doing so.
In our subset of 267 matches, the underdog won 66 of them. More than half the time, though, that was the end of the run. 38 of the 66 (58%) fell in the quarter-finals. Another 17 lost in the semis. Whatever works so well for these underdogs in the second round disappears afterward. In the 105 matches contested by these 66 men in the quarter-finals and beyond, Elo thinks they should have won 44.9% of them. Instead, they managed only 42.3%.
There’s still a bit of hope. Five men knocked out the top seed in the second round and went on to win the entire tournament. One of those was a challenger we’ve already mentioned: Estrella, who knocked out Karlovic and went on to hoist the trophy in Quito two years ago. Maybe there’s some magic in week six. This week’s trio of underdogs would surely love to think so.