During last week’s marathon fourth-rounder at Indian Wells, Daniil Medvedev tucked an unusual feat inside his 6-7, 7-6, 7-5 defeat of Alexander Zverev. Starting with the 12th game of the first set, he recovered from a 0-40 deficit in three consecutive service games.
Voo de Mar noticed:
Peter asked me if this had ever happened before, so here we are. The short answer is: I’m not sure (at least at ATP tour level), because I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. However, I have the sequence for enough matches to confirm that it’s extremely rare.
Theory first
Just falling behind 0-40 is unusual. ATP-level servers win about 65% of points, so a basic model would predict that 0-40 happens in 4.3% of service games. It’s actually more frequent than that–about 5.4%–partly because the tour does not consist of identical servers, and partly because there’s probably some streakiness involved.
Back to theory: “Erasing” a 0-40 deficit means winning three service points after losing the first three. The odds of that particularly six-point sequence–again, assuming the server wins 65% of points–is 1.2%.
The historical record agrees exactly. Across 18,000 tour-level matches from 2010s, I found that the server falls to 0-40 and recovers to deuce exactly 1.2% of the time.
Three in a row is a different story entirely. If there’s a 1% probability of something occurring once, there’s a 0.0001%–literally, one in a million–chance that it will happen three times in a row. On the other hand, there are a lot of matches and a lot of service games. Using some rough assumptions for the number of games in a match and the number of matches per season, my ballpark estimate is that we should see a rarity like this about once in every 10-12 ATP seasons.
The data
Like I said, I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. But I do have it for over 18,000 ATP matches between 2011 and early 2019. (Much of that data, plus equivalent data for women’s tennis, is here.) In that dataset, there was only one instance when a player apparently erased a 0-40 deficit three times in a row: 2011 Kuala Lumpur, where Mischa Zverev managed it against Philipp Petzschner.
Except… I’m not so sure. In 2011, betting sites were just starting to collect and publish point-by-point data, and some of it was approximate. For this particular match, there is a suspicious number of streaks, a sign that the data wasn’t reported precisely. For instance, in all three of the 0-40 rescues, Zverev purportedly won the next five points in a row. It’s possible, but we have to leave a question mark next to this one.
We can, however, broaden the search. 6,800 ATP qualifying matches? No one managed three 0-40 recoveries in a row. 28,000 Challenger matches? Now we’re talking–I found five occasions when a player saved three consecutive 0-40 deficits. The most recent was at the 2016 Tallahassee Challenger, where Donald Young accomplished it in a losing effort against Frances Tiafoe. He won the first two of the games, but in the third, serving to stay in the match, he fought back to deuce only to double fault on match point.
I found another five cases out of over 33,000 Futures-level matches. The most recent, a 2017 match between Altug Celikbilek and Francesco Vilardo, was notable because Celikbilek recovered from 0-40 in the 6th, 8th, and 10th games–and in the 7th game, Vilardo did as well!
It’s important to keep in mind that servers do not win as many points at the lower levels of men’s tennis. (Streakiness might also generate more 0-40 scores as well.) In my 2011-2019 data, servers fell to love-40 5.4% of the time at the ATP main draw level, 5.8% in ATP qualifying, 6.4% at Challengers, and 7.7% at Futures. However, that doesn’t end up generating many more recoveries, since servers are more likely to lose those games before evening the score.
If we dump all of these results together, we get 10 occasions (or 11, if you count the Petzschner match) when a player recovered from 0-40 three times in a row, out of approximately 86,400 total matches. That rate suggests that we should see a feat like Medvedev’s once every three or four years on tour. That’s more frequent than my initial calculation, but still quite rare.