Dominic Thiem is one of the best clay-court players on earth, with eight titles and a Roland Garros final to his credit. But his impressive track record wasn’t worth much last night, when he lost his opening-round match in Rio de Janeiro. The straight-set defeat to 90th-ranked Laslo Djere calls to mind other first-match failures, such as Thiem’s loss to Martin Klizan last summer in Hamburg, or his truly gobsmacking upset at the hands of 222nd-ranked Ramkumar Ramanathan on grass in Antalya two years ago.
It’s also not the first time this season that a top seed has proven unable to live up to their billing. Two weeks ago, the No. 1 seeds in three different ATP events all lost their first matches. I dug a bit deeper and discovered that top seeds underperform by a modest amount at these smaller tournaments. Rio is technically a higher-profile event, but the result is the same: An elite player at a non-mandatory event, heading home early.
You’ll hear all sorts of theories for this sort of thing. In ATP 250s, when top seeds get a bye, it’s possible that the elites are in danger because their opponents have played their way into form. At any optional events, it’s possible that the top seeds are not particularly motivated, making the trip for a quick appearance fee and nothing more. Finally, there’s the old saw that some competitors need to get used to their surroundings. In other words, they need to “play their way in” to the tournament. It’s this last theory that I’d like investigate.
Present and prepared
If a player needs time to get comfortable, we would expect him to underperform in the first round, and possibly continue playing below average to a lesser extent in the second round. The flip side of that is that the player would need to overperform in later rounds–if he didn’t, the earlier underperformance wouldn’t be below average, it would just be bad. These under- and over-performances are effects we can quantify.
Let’s start with Thiem. I went through his career results at the ATP level and broke his matches into several categories (some overlapping), like first match, second match, first match at a non-mandatory event, second-or-later match, finals, and so on. For each of those categories, I tallied up his results and compared them to expecatations (Expected Wins, or “ExpWins” in the table), based on what Elo forecasted at the time. Here are Thiem’s results:
Category Matches ExpWins Wins 1st 141 94.3 94 1st (small) 84 52.9 54 1st/2nd 238 151.3 151 2nd 97 59.9 60 2nd+ 203 117.7 118 3rd 58 34.9 35 3rd+ 106 60.7 61 4th 32 18.5 19 Finals 17 10.2 10
The Austrian has been almost comically predictable. In 84 non-mandatory tournaments through last week, Elo expected that he would win his first match 53 times. He won 54. In all tournaments, he has won his first match 94 times, exactly in line with the Elo estimation. In the nine categories shown here, his performances was never more than a 1.1 matches better or worse than expected. If he’s playing his way into tournaments, he’s doing it in a way that doesn’t show up in the results.
What about Tennys?
Thiem has suffered some rough early-round upsets, but over the course of his career, he’s usually ended up on the winning side. Maybe we’d do better to focus on a true feast-or-famine player, someone who more often loses his first-round encounters, but is dangerous when he advances further.
A great recent example of such a player is Tennys Sandgren. The American raced to the quarter-finals of last year’s Australian Open, reached a final in Houston, and won a title in Auckland to start the 2019 season. Other than that, he rarely turns up on the tennis fan’s radar. He acknowledged his inconsistency on a recent Thirty Love podcast, explaining from a player’s perspective why he thinks his results are so erratic. Like Thiem, he lost easily in an opening match last night, winning only four games against Reilly Opelka in Delray Beach.
Sandgren’s round-by-round results are less predictable than Thiem’s, but for an apparently extreme example of the go-big-or-go-home-early phenomenon, there’s not much support for it in the numbers. Because Sandgren has played fewer tour events than Thiem, I included his Challenger results before separating his matches into the same categories:
Category Matches ExpWins Wins 1st 124 64.7 62 1st (small) 113 60.2 60 1st/2nd 186 96.4 98 2nd 62 31.7 36 2nd+ 120 60.3 63 3rd 35 17.3 15 4th 15 7.3 9 Finals 8 4.2 3
The American has underperformed a bit in his first matches and beaten expectations in his second rounders, but the effect disappears after two matches are in the books. In any case, none of the over- or under-performances are even close to statistically significant. His extra first-match losses have about a one-in-three probability of happening by chance, and his bonus second-match wins would occur about one time in six. There could be something interesting going on here, but the effects are small, and it’s very likely that we’re seeing nothing more than randomness.
Positive results, anyone?
So far, we’ve investigated two players who seemed likely to over- or under-perform in certain groups of matches. Yet we found nothing. The “playing your way in” theory will surely survive this blog post, but let’s make sure there aren’t players who embody it, even if Thiem and Sandgren don’t.
I went through the same steps for the other 98 men in this week’s top 100, grouping their matches into categories, tallying up Elo-based expected wins and actual wins, and calculating the probability that their results–above or below expectations–are due to chance. The result is 1,043 player-categories, from Novak Djokovic’s finals to Pedro Sousa’s first matches. (The number of player-categories isn’t a round number because not every player has matches in every category, like 6th matches or finals.)
Of those 1,000 player-categories, only 29 meet the usual standard of statistical significance, in that there is less than a 5% chance they can be explained by randomness. A familiar example is Gael Monfils’s record in finals. Even with last week’s title in Rotterdam, his eight wins are outweighed by 21 losses. But such cases are extremely rare. Since fewer than 3% of the player-categories meet the 5% threshold, it’s wrong to say that these categories represent real trends (like, perhaps, a psychological basis for Monfils’s inability to win tournaments). When we test over one thousand groups of matches, dozens of them should look like outliers.
In other words, there’s no statistical support for the claim that certain players are more or less effective in certain rounds. It’s always possible that a very small number of guys have certain characteristics along these lines, but among the 29 player-categories with particularly unlikely results, only Monfils’s finals record fits any kind of narrative I’ve heard before. Richard Gasquet has won 120 times–11 more than expected–in first matches at non-mandatory events. That overperformance is just as unlikely as Monfils’s letdown in finals, so maybe we should be talking about how assiduously he prepares for the start of each tournament, no matter the stakes?
It’s always possible that the top men do, in fact, play their way into tournaments. But based on this evidence, it’s only the case if everyone rounds their way into form at approximately the same rate. Maybe first rounders are lower in quality than semi-finals. But if we’re interested in predicting outcomes–even Thiem’s first-round results against journeymen–we’d do better to ignore the theories. Opening matches just aren’t that unique, even for the players who think they are.