Category: Trivia

Hsieh, Errani, and a Match That Broke Everybody

In their third round match today at the Australian Open, Sara Errani and Su Wei Hsieh played 232 points. The fastest serve either one hit registered at 93 mph (149 kmh), Hsieh’s first serves averaged 85 mph, and Errani’s mean first serve speed was 75 mph. I use the word “mean” here as more than just a way to avoid saying “average” so many times.

The two veterans are crafty–dare I say tricky–players with an arsenal of weapons once the ball is in play. But the serve is mostly just a stumbling block to make the best of. Hsieh won 62 of her 115 return points, good for 54% of Errani’s serves. This is more impressive than it sounds–the Italian double faulted only four times today. It’s fairly common for a winner on the women’s tour to win more than half of her return points, but what makes this match so weird is that Errani did the same. She won 63 of her 117 return points, also a 54% clip.

About half of WTA losers fail to convert better than 50% of their service points. But only 2.4% of winners miss the mark. And there’s a huge gap between 50%–mediocre and survivable–and Hsieh’s 46%. A 46% rate of service points won translates to a 40% likelihood of holding. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what both players did, each hanging on to their service games in 6 of 15 tries.

I have the relevant stats for just under 25,000 tour-level, main draw women’s matches since 2010, and only about 80 winners–0.3%, or less than once per 300 contests–won service points at a lower clip than Hsieh did today.

** I say “about” because the stats I have from the early 2010s aren’t perfect. A match with 60% of return points won is a prime candidate to be a mistake. I checked these 80 for obvious errors, like matches with a small number of service breaks, but those numbers aren’t perfect either.

There’s no grand analytical insight to be gleaned from a match like this. It’s just a glorious oddity that reminds us how many different ways there are to win matches. (And to be honest, you only need to watch Hsieh for about 90 seconds to recognize that.) In that spirit, here’s some more trivia:

  • Since 2010, this is only the 12th Australian Open main draw match in which neither player won half of her service points.
  • The only AO match in which neither player won 46% of their service points was the 2018 third-rounder between Anett Kontaveit and Jelena Ostapenko. They both held about 45.5% of their points, and 68% of total games (17 of 25) were breaks.
  • There have been about 400 tour-level matches since 2010 in which neither player wins half of their service points. Before today, 21 of those involved Errani, and she won 17 of them.
  • The other players who have been involved in at least 12 such matches are Monica Niculescu (16), Alize Cornet (14), and Carla Suarez Navarro (13). Today was only Hsieh’s 5th appearance on the list.

Perhaps oddest of all, this the first time in four tries that Hsieh avoiding getting bageled by Errani. Last time they played, in Istanbul in 2017, the Italian won, 6-0 6-1, needing only 55 minutes and a total of 87 points. Errani was so on-form that day that she won a whopping 66% of her service points. Hsieh finally turned the tables, even if she still hasn’t figured out how to stop this dogged opponent from breaking her serve.

Ashleigh Barty’s Fully Baked Double Bagel

Not every double bagel is created equal. Today in Melbourne, Ashleigh Barty beat Danka Kovinic without losing a game, dropping only ten points. By contrast, a memorable Stuttgart first-rounder from 2015 saw Sabine Lisicki lose 6-0 6-0 to Zarina Diyas, requiring 88 points and well over an hour to play. Lisicki won 37.5% of total points played that day, while Kovinic snuck off with just 16.7%.

Barty’s performance was among the most dominant in recent WTA history. I have mostly complete match stats for the women’s tour going back to about 2010, and in that time frame, only two main draw double bagels have finished in fewer than 60 points:

Points  Year  Event       Round  Winner     Loser          
57      2017  Hua Hin     R32    Golubic    Wisitwarapron  
59      2019  New Haven   R32    Cepelova   Small          
60      2021  Aus Open    R128   Barty      Kovinic        
60      2019  Madrid      R16    Halep      Kuzmova        
61      2010  Estoril     R32    Garrigues  De Lattre      
62      2017  Bol         R32    Mrdeza     Thombare       
63      2013  Aus Open    R64    Sharapova  Doi            
63      2015  Bastad      R16    Barthel    Zanevska       
64      2015  Toronto     R64    Vinci      Knapp          
64      2017  Tokyo       R32    Krunic     Date           
64      2011  Luxembourg  R32    Garrigues  Kremer         
64      2012  Copenhagen  R32    Cornet     Ejdesgaard     
65      2010  Moscow      R16    Kirilenko  Bondarenko

Today’s drubbing is even a bit more impressive than it looks on that list. Barty lost only 10 points–among the matches listed above, that’s equal to Jana Cepelova, two more than Viktorija Golubic, and fewer than everyone else. Not all 60-pointers are identical: Because Kovinic forced one deuce game today, Barty had to win 50 points instead of the minimum 48. Simona Halep only needed 48 in her 2019 Madrid double bagel, meaning that she lost 12 of the 60 points played that day.

Double bagel probability

There’s a bit of luck involved in winning twelve games in a row, even for a player at the top of her game. Kovinic won 10 points today, so even if she did exactly the same thing in her next match, one can imagine her “bunching” her points differently and putting a game or two on the board. Unlikely, but possible.

For any match, we can take the winner’s rate of service points won and return points won, and then generate the probability that she wins twelve games in a row. I did this exact exercise last January during the ATP Cup when Roberto Bautista Agut handed a 6-0 6-0 loss to Aleksandre Metreveli. Metreveli lasted 97 points, or 61% longer than Kovinic. If Metreveli had continued to play at that level, his chances of losing twelve games in a row would have been a mere 14.8%.

Barty won 88.9% of her service points and 78.8% of her return points against Kovinic today. If she continued at those rates, assuming no unusual streakiness or significantly better or worse performance at certain point scores, she would hold serve 99.8% of the time and break in 97.2% of return games. (By contrast, Bautista Agut’s probabilities were “only” 98.9% and 73.6%.)

The likelihood of a 6-0 6-0 bagel is simply that of six holds and six breaks. For Barty: (99.8% ^ 6) * (97.2% ^ 6), or 83.6%. In other words, the way she was playing today, Ash would score the double bagel five out of six times.

This probability is the number that really tells you how dominant a player was, even if it’s a few levels more complex than counting points and points lost. And by this measure, only Golubic’s great day holds a place on the list ahead of Barty’s. The p(DB) column shows the probability of a double bagel.

p(DB)  Year  Event       Round  Winner          Loser           
88.7%  2017  Hua Hin     R32    Golubic         Wisitwarapron   
83.6%  2021  Aus Open    R128   Barty           Kovinic         
80.0%  2019  New Haven   R32    Cepelova        Small           
76.8%  2019  Madrid      R16    Halep           Kuzmova         
75.4%  2017  Tokyo       R32    Krunic          Date            
68.8%  2011  Luxembourg  R32    Garrigues       Kremer          
66.9%  2010  Estoril     R32    Garrigues       De Lattre       
64.9%  2017  Bastad      R32    Krejcikova      Beck            
64.1%  2017  Bol         R32    Mrdeza          Thombare        
62.0%  2010  Moscow      R16    Kirilenko       Bondarenko      
60.7%  2016  US Open     R128   Suarez Navarro  Pereira         
59.2%  2013  Aus Open    R64    Sharapova       Doi             
59.2%  2018  US Open     R128   Gavrilova       Sorribes Tormo

Gotta love the coincidence here. 13th on this list is a 2018 US Open first-rounder between Daria Gavrilova and Sara Sorribes Tormo. Both players are still going strong (except when Sorribes Tormo was up 6-0 4-0 on Aryna Sabalenka in Ostrava last October), both are in Melbourne, and they drew each other again this week. Gavrilova won again, though not quite as easily. Her reward? A second-round match on Thursday with Ashleigh Barty.

The Rarity of Winning Two Titles at One Tournament

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

With all the drama in the tennis world right now–paradoxically despite the lack of official match results–a dry analytical article might be just what you need. And what better opportunity than quarantine to work through my long list of articles to write?

In June 2019, Feliciano Lopez had to complete five matches in two days. Not because he had to hop between tournaments as a 22-year-old Jo-Wilfried Tsonga did in 2007, but because Lopez went deep into both the singles and doubles draws on the grass courts at Queen’s Club, ultimately winning both titles.

Lopez won all four of his singles matches in the deciding set, and there was not much time to celebrate and recover after the final, because the doubles title match awaited. Partnering a rehabilitating Andy Murray seems to have been a sensible decision based on the fact that Murray’s most lopsided head-to-head of 11-0 is against Lopez. By doing so, Lopez could be guaranteed to avoid facing Murray in the doubles draw. An unusual strategy–and probably not his top consideration in choosing a partner–but it worked.

Lifting two trophies on finals day happens quite often at the Challenger tour, but is unusual on the main tour, where the best singles players often skip the doubles draw entirely. But how rare is it? And has it changed over the years? Longtime fans will immediately think of John McEnroe and his nearly equal tally of doubles titles (78) and singles titles (77). The modest title counts of Roger Federer (6) and Rafael Nadal (11) pale in comparison, even though the Spaniard is an exceptional doubles player.

Let’s take a look at the instances when a player won both trophies at the same tournament since 2005.

Year	Tournament	Player (Partner)
2005	Dusseldorf	Tommy Haas (Alexander Waske)
2005	Halle		Roger Federer (Yves Allegro)
2005	Basel		Fernando Gonzalez (Agustin Calleri)
2006	Vina del Mar	Jose Acasuso (Sebastian Prieto)
2007	Chennai		Xavier Malisse (Dick Norman)
2007	Delray Beach	Xavier Malisse (Hugo Armando)
2007	Munich		Philipp Kohlschreiber (Mikhail Youzhny)
2007	Dusseldorf	Agustin Calleri (Juan Ignacio Chela)
2008	Monte Carlo	Rafael Nadal (Tommy Robredo)
2008	Dusseldorf	Robin Soderling (Robert Lindstedt)
2009	Costa Do Sauipe	Tommy Robredo (Marcel Granollers)
2009	San Jose	Radek Stepanek (Tommy Haas)
2009	Newport		Rajeev Ram (Jordan Kerr)
2010	Memphis		Sam Querrey (John Isner)
2010	Marseille	Michael Llodra (Julien Benneteau)
2010	Bucharest	Juan Ignacio Chela (Lukasz Kubot)
2011	Tokyo		Andy Murray (Jamie Murray)
2012	Zagreb		Mikhail Youzhny (Marcos Baghdatis)
2013	Newport		Nicolas Mahut (Edouard Roger Vasselin)
2014	Newport		Lleyton Hewitt (Chris Guccione)
2017	Montpellier	Alexander Zverev (Mischa Zverev)
2018	Gstaad		Matteo Berrettini (Daniele Bracciali)
2019	London		Feliciano Lopez (Andy Murray)

Two things may catch one’s eye when looking at the list: First, since 2011 the double-title feat occurred slightly less than once per year. But before that it happened several times a year with the sole exception of 2006. Second, the only player who managed to win both titles at a Masters event is Nadal at Monte Carlo in 2008.

It is obvious, and a frequent topic of tennis hipster talk, that top singles players do not care as much about doubles anymore, certainly not as much as McEnroe and his peers did. One line of argument is that the way that modern doubles tennis has evolved to become more and more different from the singles game. In order to keep up with that, singles players would need to adapt their practice routine, which might detract from potential singles success. Long story short, the argument is that doubles became too “difficult” for singles players.

But let’s look at the numbers. The following graphs show the composition of draws since the year 2000. We see the percentage of players in singles draws, who also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament for three different categories (A = All, M = Masters, G = Grand Slams). The first graph shows the numbers for top 50 singles players and the second graph for top 10 singles players.

Percentage of top 50 players entering doubles draws per 5 years
Percentage of top 10 players entering doubles draws per 5 years

The first graph is not very dramatic, but it establishes that the habits of top 50 singles players have been quite steady over the past 20 years among all tournament categories. Since the year 2000, irrespective of event categories, between 41 and 47 percent of top 50 players entering a singles draw also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament.*

The second graph shows us that the numbers for top 10 players are a different story entirely. Ignoring tournament categories, the number of top 10 players participating in doubles draws has plummeted from 35 to 22 percent. While the numbers also decreased if we only look at Masters tournaments, it is interesting that it remains higher than the overall number. This can likely be explained by the fact that the prize money for doubles at Masters events is significantly higher than at regular tour events. Often the organizers of these tournaments also have the financial power to persuade top players to play doubles in order to–I am hypothesizing here–increase ticket sales or attendance in the early days of a tournament. See the Indian Wells Masters for instance, which is known for its stellar doubles draw every year.

The most drastic decline in doubles attendance by top 10 singles players can be seen at the Grand Slams, however. While in the period between the years 2000 and 2004 every fifth singles player took part in the doubles, in the past five years only one out of 183 singles entries also appeared in the doubles draw. The sole exception (of course!) was Dominic Thiem, who entered the 2016 US Open doubles competition ranked number 10 in singles with his countryman Tristan Samuel Weissborn.

As with many analyses it is difficult to provide a definitive answer to the question at hand. But the numbers help us to see the size of the effects and theorize about its causes. That doubles competition has become more and more specialized certainly has its validity. At the same time, the numbers also suggest that top singles players simply optimize for prize money, which means focusing on singles, not doubles. If there was a McEnroe-esque player on tour today (as Rafa might be), he just wouldn’t play enough doubles to win nearly 80 titles.

However, it is hard to tell which was first: The decline of singles players playing doubles due to reasons such as financial motivation (among possibly many others), or the players’ realization that they simply cannot keep up with the elite doubles competition? One thing may be for sure though: Had TennisTV already existed a few decades ago, it would have shown a lot more doubles than it does now.

—

* Note that there is the possibility that a few singles players might have been willing to enter the doubles draw of a tournament, but couldn’t, because their ranking was too low among other reasons. However, I think this affects the analysis only marginally, if at all.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Aleksandre Metreveli’s Bad Day Wasn’t Double-Bagel Bad

Roberto Bautista Agut got his 2020 season off to a roaring start on Saturday at the ATP Cup, knocking out the No. 2 Georgian player, Aleksandre Metreveli, by the embarrassing score of 6-0 6-0. Double bagels are extremely rare on the men’s tour, with fewer than 100 recorded in the last three decades.

About one-quarter of those 6-0 6-0 results have come in Davis Cup, the most likely venue for such an uneven matchup. Davis Cup’s reverse singles, the (largely defunct) part of the competition that pits each side’s top player against the other’s second-best, generates particularly lopsided outcomes. The ATP Cup doesn’t have that, but Bautista Agut is better than many national number ones, and Metreveli is one of the handful of competitors in Australia this week who would never otherwise feature in a tour-level event.

Still, it wasn’t quite as lopsided as all that.

The match lasted 72 minutes, longer than any of the 59 ATP double bagels for which I have match stats. It was only the fourth 6-0 6-0 result to reach the one-hour mark. The previous longest double bagel was a 65-minute contest at the 2005 Rome Masters in which Guillermo Canas battered Juan Monaco. Of the 120 women’s tour-level double bagels for which I have stats, none exceeded 67 minutes.

Counting stats

Match times can be affected by player tics and crowd conditions, but the number of points played cannot. By that measure as well, Metreveli was better than his scoreline. He kept the Spaniard on court for 97 points, longer than all but three of the previous ATP double bagels. The average 6-0 6-0 men’s match lasts only 74 points. Over 150 tour-level matches last year required 97 or fewer points, including several finals and a couple of contests that included a 7-5 set.

Another way to look at the closeness of the match is to consider break points saved. The score requires that Metreveli didn’t break serve, and that Bautista Agut did so six times. But the Georgian fought hard against the Spaniard’s return assault, saving eight break points. Only four of the 59 previous double-bagel losers withstood so many break attempts.

Double bagel chances

Bautista Agut won 83% of his service points, and Metreveli won only 40%. If those rates continued without any unusual streaks of points won or lost, that would translate to a 98.9% hold percentage for the Spaniard and a 26.4% hold percentage for the Georgian. To win all twelve games, RBA needed to hold six times and break six times. Based on these hold rates, his chances of doing so were 14.8%.

Put another way, if these two players kept playing at the same levels for a large number of matches (sorry, Aleksandre!), the score would be 6-0 6-0 only about one match out of six.

Once again, Metreveli’s performance stands out as one of the strongest to result in a double bagel. Only five of the previous 59 drubbings had such a low probability of turning out 6-0 6-0. Measured by double-bagel probability, eight matches from the 2019 season were more lopsided than this one, and only one of them ended in twelve straight games. Three of the losers managed to avoid any bagels at all:

Event          Winner       Loser         Score        DB Prob  
Winston Salem  Fratangelo   Weintraub     6-0 6-0        63.5%  
Los Cabos      Granollers   Gomez         6-0 6-1        24.6%  
Us Open        Federer      Goffin        6-2 6-2 6-0    19.9%  
Estoril        Dav. Fokina  Chardy        6-1 6-2        18.5%  
Acapulco       Millman      Gojowczyk     6-0 6-2        17.2%  
Rome           Nadal        Basilashvili  6-1 6-0        16.6%  
Miami          Car. Baena   Kudla         6-1 6-2        16.6%  
Tokyo          Djokovic     Pouille       6-1 6-2        15.5%

(Yes, Metreveli fared better against RBA than Basilashvili did against Nadal last May! The Basilashvili-Nadal rematch on Saturday was a bit closer, though.)

None of this is to say that Metreveli had a good day in his ATP Cup debut. However, double bagels are so rare that they tend to grab the headlines, pushing the details to the side. Given how the Georgian played in his ATP Cup debut, he deserved a more pedestrian loss with at least a game or two in the win column.

There’s Always a Chance: Marie Bouzkova Edition

Last night in Toronto, 91st-ranked qualifier Marie Bouzkova won her quarter-final match against 4th-ranked Simona Halep. Halep retired with a leg injury after losing the first set, so there’s a caveat–even if we were prepared to read too much into a single match, we wouldn’t attribute a lot of meaning to this one. But it’s a big accomplishment for the 21-year-old Czech, who earned her second top-ten scalp of the week and will advance to her first Premier-level semi-final, against no less of an obstacle than Serena Williams.

Here’s the nutty thing: It was Bouzkova’s 62nd match of the 2019 season, her 61st against someone with a WTA ranking. She got the win against the highest-ranked foe–Halep–but just last week, she lost to 636th-ranked CoCo Vandeweghe, her lowest-ranked opponent of the year. Yeah, the caveats keep coming: Vandeweghe is coming back from injury and is surely better than a ranking outside the top 600, and the ITF Transition Tour hijinks mean that the ranking system didn’t work as usual in 2019. Some players who would normally have a very low ranking, like the Kazakh wild card who Bouzkova crushed a couple of weeks ago, don’t count.

Still. 61 matches, with a win against the highest-ranked player and a loss against the lowest.

That sent me to my database, which had plenty more surprises in store. Going back less than a decade, to 2010, I found 127 players who recorded the same oddball combination of feats in a single season, minimum 30 matches. (To be consistent with the Halep result, I included retirements if at least one set was completed.) While many of the players won’t be of wide interest–last year, one of the exemplars was Mira Antonitsch, who didn’t play anyone ranked in the top 400–63 of the 127 player-seasons involved beating a top-100 opponent, 44 included the defeat of someone in the top 50, and 25 were highlighted by a top-ten upset.

Three of them included Halep as the top-ten scalp! That makes Bouzkova the fourth player to beat Halep, not face anyone higher ranked, and also lose to her lowest-ranked opponent of the season. (Through eight months, anyway.) Halep shouldn’t feel too bad, though, as Angelique Kerber has been the extreme-ranked loser in five such cases, four of them in 2017. Ouch.

Here are the 25 player-seasons between 2010 and 2018 in which a WTAer beat her highest-ranked opponent and lost to her lowest:

Year  Player       High-Ranked  Rk  Low-Ranked  Rk       
2017  Kasatkina    Kerber       1   Kanepi      418      
2018  Hsieh        Halep        1   Gasparyan   410      
2010  Jankovic     Serena       1   Diyas       268      
2010  Clijsters    Wozniacki    1   G-Vidagany  258   *  
2014  Cornet       Serena       1   Townsend    205      
2010  Yakimova     Jankovic     2   Dellacqua   980      
2017  Bouchard     Kerber       2   Duval       896   *  
2017  Vesnina      Kerber       2   Azarenka    683      
2016  Bencic       Kerber       2   Boserup     225      
2014  Rybarikova   Halep        2   Eguchi      183      
2017  Mladenovic   Kerber       2   Andreescu   167   *  
2018  Goerges      Wozniacki    3   Serena      451      
2014  Tomljanovic  Radwanska    3   A Bogdan    308      
2015  Mladenovic   Halep        3   Savchuk     262      
2017  Kerber       Pliskova     4   Stephens    934      
2014  Pavlyu'ova   Radwanska    4   Wozniak     241      
2017  Dodin        Cibulkova    5   Rybarikova  453      
2017  Bellis       Radwanska    6   Azarenka    683      
2018  Buyukakcay   Ostapenko    6   Di Sarra    555      
2017  Sakkari      Wozniacki    6   Potapova    454      
2015  L Davis      Bouchard     7   E Bogdan    527      
2015  Ostapenko    S-Navarro    9   Dushevina   1100  *  
2016  KC Chang     Vinci        10  S Murray    862      
2018  Pera         Konta        10  Hlavackova  825      
2018  Danilovic    Goerges      10  Pegula      620

* also faced one unranked player

A quick glance is all it takes to establish that Vandeweghe isn’t the first lowest-ranked player to inspire a “yeah, but” reaction. The list of purportedly weak opponents is very strong for one made up of players with an average ranking outside of the top 500. We have stars such as Victoria Azarenka (twice) and Serena as well as a helping of prospects such as Bianca Andreescu and Victoria Duval.

Consider this as today’s reminder of the limitations of the WTA computer rankings. They tell us who has won a lot of matches in the last 52 weeks, not necessarily who is playing well right now. These cases include many of the most extreme mismatches between official ranking and on-the-day ability. I don’t think it says anything meaningful about a player to show up on this list–though Kerber’s many appearances (as both player and scalp!) are a good summary of her disappointing 2017 campaign.

Bouzkova will remain on the list for at least a couple more days: Serena is currently ranked 10th and both of the other semi-finalists are ranked lower, so Halep will remain her “toughest” opponent. Despite the Czech’s breakout week, it would be understandable if she found herself overawed to face a 23-time slam champion across the net. But one thing is certain: Bouzkova couldn’t care less about the number next to the name.

Roger Federer, Lottery Winner

In today’s third-round match in Rome, Roger Federer posted a truly unusual stat line. He beat Borna Coric in three sets, 2-6 6-4 7-6(7), winning 95 points to Coric’s 107. That’s a total-points-won rate (TPW) 47.0%, not unheard of for a match winner, but near the lower limit of what’s possible. By Dominance Ratio (DR)–the ratio of return points won to serve points lost–Fed comes out at 0.78, where 1.0 represents an evenly-split match. He has won only 24 times in his career with a DR below 1.0, and today was the first time since 2015. These types of decisions are often referred to as “lottery matches,” because there is more luck than usual involved in the result.

Not only did Federer win the match with a TPW below 50% and a DR below 1.0, all three of his individual sets were below those numbers. He won 23 of 55 points in the first set, 31 of 64 in the second, and 41 of 83 in the third. The low total in the first set is to be expected–he lost that set badly. But often, low numbers for an entire match stem from a bad performance in a single set, like the swoon in a 7-6 1-6 7-6 contest. Coric outplayed him–narrowly, at least–in all three sets.

You might suspect that this is extremely rare, and you’d be right. Only 4.5% of ATP tour-level matches end in favor of the player who won fewer points, and 7.2% go the direction of a player with a DR below 1.0. Those numbers usually overlap, but not always. Roughly 4.0% of matches are won by a player with a TPW below 50% and a DR below 1.0. Individual sets are even more likely to be awarded to the player who won more points. Just 2.4% of sets are won by the man who lost more points. The frequency of DR < 1.0 is 7.4%, about the same as at the match level.

It turns out that there is a precedent–exactly one!–for Fed’s feat, of winning a match with TPW < 50% and DR < 1.0 in each of three sets. That’s one previous occurence in my dataset of point-by-point sequences for over 17,000 ATP tour-level matches since 2010. Inevitably, John Isner was involved. At Memphis in 2017, Isner lost his quarter-final match to Donald Young, 7-6 3-6 7-6. Young won only 46.9% of total points, and his DR was 0.66, both marks among the lowest you’ll ever see for a winner. Like Federer, Young came close in the sets he won, tallying 49.3% of all points in both the first and third set. By saving eight of nine break points and withstanding the Isner serve in the tiebreaks, Young managed to overcome a statistically superior opponent.

Federer’s victory today wasn’t particularly reliant on break point performance, though fans will be encouraged that he converted two of his four opportunities. Much has been written about Roger’s ineffectiveness in this sort of match–against his 24 wins with a sub-1.0 DR, he has 49 losses with a DR above 1.0–and break point futility is often to blame. While big servers tend to play a lot of close matches, Federer has managed to record plenty of wins without relying on the lucky ones.

With a guaranteed place in the prominent parts of the record book, Fed is making a move on the obscure pages in the back. Having repeatedly shown us that he can win matches by outplaying the guy on the other side of the net, he finally came up with a victory when the stats pointed in the other direction.

Jürgen Melzer and Singles Players Who Care About Doubles

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Italian translation at settesei.it

Three weeks ago, Jürgen Melzer played his last singles tournament on home turf at the Erste Bank Open in Vienna. His low singles ranking, caused by injury setbacks and a mediocre comeback campaign, required him to enter into the tournament as a wild card. Melzer drew Milos Raonic in the first round; bookmakers and fans alike predicted that this would be Melzer’s last singles match.

However, things went differently. In front of a packed arena (at least by tournament-Monday standards) Melzer squeezed out a two set win to face Kevin Anderson in the round of 16. That match never happened, though, after a suddenly occurring gastritis forced him to withdraw. As weird as it sounds, this means that Melzer did not lose the last match of his singles career, a feat only a few players can put on their CV.

Another unique thing about Melzer is that he is one of the last players to reach an elite level in singles as well as in doubles. To underline this characteristic let’s start by looking at singles (ChS) and doubles (ChD) career high rankings of  recently-retired1 top ten singles players. The following table shows each player’s peak singles and doubles rankings, sorted by the date at which each player recorded their best singles ranking:

Player			ChS	ChS Date  ChD	ChD Date
Paradorn Srichaphan	9	2003-05	  79	2003-09
Juan Carlos Ferrero	1	2003-09	  198	2003-02
Andy Roddick		1	2003-11	  50	2010-01
Rainer Schuettler	5	2004-04	  40	2005-07
Guillermo Coria		3	2004-05	  183	2004-03
Nicolas Massu		9	2004-09	  31	2005-07
Joachim Johansson	9	2005-02	  108	2005-09
Gaston Gaudio		5	2005-04	  78	2004-06
Guillermo Canas		8	2005-06	  47	2002-07
Mariano Puerta		9	2005-08	  68	1999-08
David Nalbandian	3	2006-03	  105	2009-10
Ivan Ljubicic		3	2006-05	  70	2005-05
Mario Ancic		7	2006-07	  47	2004-06
Radek Stepanek		8	2006-07	  4	2012-11
Nikolay Davydenko	3	2006-11	  31	2005-06
James Blake		4	2006-11	  31	2003-03
Fernando Gonzalez	5	2007-01	  25	2005-07
Robin Soderling		4	2010-11	  109	2009-05
Jürgen Melzer           8       2011-04   6     2010-10
Nicolas Almagro		9	2011-05	  48	2011-03
Mardy Fish		7	2011-08	  14	2009-07
Janko Tipsarevic	8	2012-04	  46	2011-04
Juan Monaco		10	2012-07	  41	2009-01

The data shows that top ten singles players rarely climb up to the very top in doubles. Of course, there can be several reasons for this: scheduling (playing a full singles schedule can be exhausting) or skill (being a good singles player doesn’t necessarily mean that you are also a good doubles player), among others. The fact that the best doubles career high ranking by the Big Four is Roger Federer’s rank of 24 reached in 2003 further underlines that top singles players have better things to do than practicing their volleying skills.

So, as the table above already suggests, Melzer is one of the last of the breed of players that–ranking-wise–made it until the very top in both singles and doubles. The following table shows players who reached a top-ten career high in both rankings, sorted by when they achieved their high in doubles back until 1990.

Player		    ChS	ChS Date   ChD	ChD Date
Petr Korda	    2	1998-02	   10	1990-06
Michael Stich	    2	1993-11	   9	1991-03
Marc Rosset	    9	1995-09	   8	1992-11
Yevgeny Kafelnikov  1	1999-05	   4	1998-03
Patrick Rafter	    1	1999-07	   6	1999-02
Wayne Ferreira	    6	1995-05	   9	2001-03
Jiri Novak	    5	2002-10	   6	2001-07
Jonas Björkman	    4	1997-11	   1	2001-07
Arnaud Clement	    10	2001-04	   8	2008-01
Jürgen Melzer	    8	2011-04	   6	2010-10
Radek Stepanek	    8	2006-07	   4	2012-11
Fernando Verdasco*  7	2009-04	   8	2013-11
Jack Sock*	    8	2017-11	   2	2018-09

* Active singles player

Since 1990 there have only been 13 players who reached a doubles and singles career high inside the top ten. The last number one with a top ten doubles ranking was Patrick Rafter. Currently there are only two active singles players part of this group. As has already been mentioned on this blog several times, Jack Sock’s doubles prowess is an exception no matter how you look at it. And the time between Fernando Verdasco’s singles high and doubles high shows that he reached them at two completely different stages of his career, which brings us to the final measure: Which players held a top ten spot in both rankings at the same time? The following table shows players, weeks spent in the singles top ten (weeksS), weeks spent in the doubles top ten (weeksD) and weeks spent in both singles and doubles top ten at the same time (weeksS+D) sorted by the date the doubles career high was reached.

Player		weeksS	weeksD	weeksS+D Chd Date
John Mcenroe	208	96	74	 1983-01
Pat Cash	89	14	5	 1984-08
Anders Jarryd	82	379	78	 1985-08
Mats Wilander	227	72	72	 1985-10
Stefan Edberg	452	122	117	 1986-06
Guy Forget	79	119	5	 1986-08
Yannick Noah	157	87	84	 1986-08
Andres Gomez	143	62	31	 1986-09
Boris Becker	530	21	21	 1986-09
Joakim Nystrom	72	57	33	 1986-11
Miloslav Mecir	109	19	19	 1988-03
Emilio Sanchez	57	138	44	 1989-04
Jakob Hlasek	37	132	10	 1989-11
Yevgeny Kafeln.	388	157	148	 1998-03
Patrick Rafter	156	33	26	 1999-02
Jonas Björkman	43	462	29	 2001-07
Jürgen Melzer	14	50	14	 2010-09

With Melzer’s retirement, there is no active player who held a top ten ranking in singles and doubles at the same week. In other words, he is the last player who held simultaneous top ten rankings in singles and doubles. With Jonas Björkman this makes him one of only two players in this group for the past 18 years! Even in the nineties there were only two players–Rafter and Yevgeny Kafelnikov–reaching this feat, whereas in the eighties there were many others.

Even if this stream of trivia does not tell us much analytically, we can see that players peaking with and without partners on their side of the court are becoming a rare species. The times when they have done so simultaneously are long gone.

Footnotes

1. We look at retired players, because their career high rankings are not subject to change anymore.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Ivo Karlovic and the Odds-On Tiebreak

Italian translation at settesei.it

Ivo Karlovic is on track to accomplish something that no player has ever done before. Over the course of his career, Karlovic, along with John Isner, has set a new standard for one-dimensional tennis playing. The big men win so many service points that they are almost impossible to break, making their own service-return limitations manageable. With a player on court who maximizes the likelihood of service holds, tiebreaks seem inevitable.

This season, Karlovic has taken tiebreak-playing to a new level. Through last night’s semi-final at the Calgary Challenger (final score: 7-6, 7-6), the 6-11 Croatian has played 42 matches, including 115 sets and 61 tiebreaks. In percentage terms, that’s a tiebreak in 53% of all sets. Among player-seasons with at least 30 matches across the ATP, ATP qualifying, and ATP Challenger levels since 1990, no one has ever before topped 50%.

Even approaching the 50% threshold marks someone as very unusual. Less than 20% of tour-level sets reach 6-6, and it’s rare for any single player to top 30%. This year, only Isner and Nick Kyrgios have joined Karlovic in the 30%-plus club. Even Reilly Opelka, the seven-foot American prospect, has tallied only 31 tiebreaks in 109 sets this season, good for a more modest rate of 28.4%.

Karlovic is in truly uncharted territory. Isner came very close in his breakthrough 2007 season on the Challenger tour, playing 51 tiebreaks in 102 sets. The rest of the all-time top ten list starts to get a little repetitive:

Rank  Year  Player        Sets  TBs    TB%  
1     2018  Ivo Karlovic   115   61  53.0%  
2     2007  John Isner     102   51  50.0%  
3     2005  Ivo Karlovic   118   56  47.5%  
4     2016  Ivo Karlovic   146   68  46.6%  
5     2017  Ivo Karlovic    91   42  46.2%  
6     2006  Ivo Karlovic   106   48  45.3%  
7     2015  Ivo Karlovic   168   76  45.2%  
8     2018  John Isner     149   65  43.6%  
9     2001  Ivo Karlovic    78   34  43.6%  
10    2004  Ivo Karlovic   140   61  43.6%

* Karlovic’s and Isner’s 2018 totals are through matches of October 20th. 

For more variety, here are the 15 different players with the highest single-season tiebreak rates:

Rank  Year  Player           Sets  TBs    TB%  
1     2018  Ivo Karlovic      115   61  53.0%  
2     2007  John Isner        102   51  50.0%  
3     2004  Amer Delic         95   37  38.9%  
4     2008  Michael Llodra    117   45  38.5%  
5     2008  Chris Guccione    173   65  37.6%  
6     2002  Alexander Waske   109   40  36.7%  
7     1993  Greg Rusedski      99   35  35.4%  
8     2017  Reilly Opelka     115   40  34.8%  
9     2005  Wayne Arthurs      95   33  34.7%  
10    2004  Dick Norman        97   33  34.0%  
11    2001  Ivan Ljubicic     148   50  33.8%  
12    2004  Max Mirnyi        137   46  33.6%  
13    2014  Samuel Groth      172   57  33.1%  
14    2005  Gregory Carraz     98   32  32.7%  
15    2007  Fritz Wolmarans    80   26  32.5%

Karlovic is truly in a class by himself. He’ll turn 40 next February, but age has had little impact on the effectiveness of his serve. While he reached his career peak ranking of No. 14 back in 2008, it was more recently that his serve was at its best. In 2015, he won more than three-quarters of his service points and held 95.5% of his serve games. Both of those marks were career highs. His recent serve stats have remained among his career bests, winning 73.5% of service points in 2018, though as his ranking has tumbled, these feats have come against weaker competition, in ATP qualifying and Challenger matches.

Age has taken its toll, however, and Ivo’s return game is the victim. From 2008-12, he broke serve in more than one out of ten chances, while in 2016-18, it has fallen below 8%. Neither mark is particularly impressive–Isner and Kyrgios are the only tour regulars to break in less than 17% of games this season–but the difference, from a peak of 12.0% in 2011 to a low of 7.1% this year, helps explain why the Croatian is playing more tiebreaks than ever.

Karlovic has long been one of the most unique players on tour, thanks to his height, his extreme statistical profile, and his willingness (or maybe his need) to approach the net. As he gets older and his game becomes even more one-dimensional, it’s only fitting that he breaks some of his own records, continuing past the age when most of his peers retire in order to hit even more aces and play even more tiebreaks.

Marketa Vondrousova’s Next-Level Lottery Match

Embed from Getty Images

Vondrousova sits in awe of her own statistical feat.

Italian translation at settesei.it

By most measures, Marketa Vondrousova wasn’t supposed to win her third-round encounter with Kiki Bertens at the US Open on Saturday. She won a mere 47.1% of points, 12 fewer than Bertens, and she lost her own service game two more times than she broke her opponent’s. That’s not all:

The trick is in the scoreline: 7-6(4) 2-6 7-6(1). Her two sets weren’t as dominant as Bertens’s one, but the Czech was a bit better in the high-leverage moments, especially in the third-set tiebreak. And that’s all: Measured by almost all the peripheral stats available, Bertens played better on Saturday.

Vondrousova’s victory was what has come to be termed a “lottery match.” I use the phrase to refer to all matches in which neither player wins more than 53% of total points, the threshold at which it is almost guaranteed that the winner will be the competitor who wins more points. Between 50% and 53%, clutch and luck play a bigger part. While Vondrousova’s 47.1% is rarely good enough to come out on top–only two WTA matches so far this year have gone the way of a player who won less–it’s possible. According to my win probability model, when a player wins 63% of service points and 44% on return, she’ll end up triumphant 82% of the time.

A unique feat

Lottery matches are fairly common, and matches won by the player who claimed fewer points aren’t that unusual either. Since 2013, there have been about 100 of them each year on the WTA tour, accounting for nearly one in every twenty contests. The rarity of what Vondrousova managed in New York is summed up by Ravi Ubha’s tweet. Usually, the winner in such matches has something going for her, like good fortune on break point chances, or even a beneficial dearth of double faults.

I narrowed Ubha’s list down to five items: total points won (TPW), return points won (RPW), breaks of serve, aces, and double faults. The first two track each other quite closely, but sometimes if one player must serve a lot more than the other, she can win return points at a higher rate than her opponent despite a lower overall TPW. The last three are more independent. Ace and double fault totals aren’t particularly crucial to match outcomes–there are innumerable cases in which players lead in one or both categories yet go home empty-handed–but as they add to the uniqueness of Vondrousova’s feat, I’ve included them here. I would have liked to consider winners and unforced errors as well, but those stats are only published by the grand slams.

Of the 532 loser-won-more-points matches I identified between 2013 and 2018 (not including the US Open), 192 met the first three criteria: The winner had a lower TPW, a lower RPW, and fewer breaks of serve than her opponent. Of those 192, the set that met all five numbers only 39–about 0.3% of the WTA matches in that span with available match stats. Six of those matches happened this year, though two were at WTA $125K events, which some people probably wouldn’t include. (One of them was the Anning $125K final between Irina Khromacheva and the truly unfortunate Saisai Zheng.)

Before Saturday’s match, Coco Vandeweghe was the most-frequent victim of these next-level lottery matches–surprising, because she so often out-aces her opponents–having been victimized three times. Five other players have ended up on the wrong side twice: Johanna Konta, Kristyna Pliskova, Varvara Lepchenko, Alison Van Uytvanck, and … Kiki Bertens. Bertens will move into a tie with Vandeweghe when this year’s US Open matches are entered into the record books.

Bertens has enjoyed a season to remember thus far, winning titles in Charleston and Cincinnati, reaching the championship match in Madrid, and defeating ten of her last eleven top-ten opponents. Her loss to Vondrousova won’t go down as one of the season highlights but, as in so many of her other matches this year, Bertens can be confident she was the better player that day.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Marco Cecchinato’s Run to the Roland Garros Semifinal

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

When a 25 year old Italian tennis player named Marco Cecchinato defeated Marius Copil in the first round of this year’s edition of Roland Garros, some people may have noticed that it was one of the longer first round matches. With a duration of 3 hours and 41 minutes the match was the fifth longest of the 64 opening round matches. However, I am confident that no one suspected the winner of this encounter would go much farther in the draw. Little did we know.

After his unexpected four set win in the quarterfinal against a hard-fighting Novak Djokovic–bookmakers were giving him about an 11 percent chance of winning–many tweets emphasized the uniqueness of this achievement. Since it is difficult to provide more context in a tweet, I was interested in just how often something like this happened in the past. So I looked into the data and came up with more complete lists of the tweeted facts which are presented in the remainder of this post.

The first and obvious question is, when was the last time that a player ranked as high as Cecchinato reached a Grand Slam semifinal?

The following table shows players ranked outside of the top-70 that reached a Grand Slam semifinal. Rows denoting achievements at Roland Garros are bold.

Tourney Player		       Rank	Round
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato	 72	SF
W  08	Rainer Schuettler	 94	SF
W  08	Marat Safin		 75	SF
AO 04	Marat Safin		 86	F
W  01	Goran Ivanisevic	125	W
W  00	Vladimir Voltchkov	237	SF
RG 99	Andrei Medvedev		100	F
AO 99	Nicolas Lapentti	 91	SF
AO 98	Nicolas Escude		 81	SF
W  97	Michael Stich		 88	SF
RG 97	Filip Dewulf		122	SF
RG 92	Henri Leconte		200	SF
UO 91	Jimmy Connors		174	SF
AO 91	Patrick Mcenroe		114	SF

As the tweet points out the most recent comparable runs by Rainer Schuettler and Marat Safin happened after the players have reached top-10 rankings. Hence, the most recent really comparable run where the player has not reached his career high ranking at the time of the tournament, is by Vladimir Voltchkov, who reached the semifinal at Wimbledon 2000.*

Another unique thing about Cecchinato’s run is that until last week he did not win a single match at a Grand Slam event.

The following table shows players that won their first match at a Grand Slam event and went on to win more matches. To prevent showing an extremely short table, I relaxed the condition on how far the player should have gone when winning his first Grand Slam match to reaching the quarterfinal. The last column Attempts denotes the number of main draw appearances until his first main draw win.

Tourney   Player	   Rank    Reached Attempts
RG 18	  Marco Cecchinato   72	   SF	   6
AO 18     Tennys Sandgren    97	   QF	   3
RG 03	  Martin Verkerk     46	   F	   3
W  00     Alexander Popp    114	   QF	   2
W  97	  Nicolas Kiefer     98	   QF	   3
RG 97	  Galo Blanco	    111	   QF	   4
W  96	  Alex Radulescu     91	   QF	   1
RG 95	  Albert Costa	     36	   QF	   4
RG 94     Hendrik Dreekmann  89	   QF	   2
AO 93	  Brett Steven	     71	   QF	   1

As the table shows, rarely has a player gotten past the quarterfinal after recording his debut win at a Grand Slam, with the notable exception of Martin Verkerk, who reached the final 15 years ago at his third attempt. Still–especially in the 1990s–there were a few players who won four consecutive matches. Not included in the table, but not less impressive, is the run by Mikael Pernfors. Interestingly, he had not won a single Grand Slam match, but he had built himself a ranking of 26, when he reached the final round of Roland Garros 1986, where he also won his first main draw match.

When looking at male Grand Slam competitors from Italy, not many names besides Fabio Fognini, Andreas Seppi, Simone Bolelli, and Paolo Lorenzi spring to mind. With 150 main draw appearances, the quartet shares a mere ten appearances in the round of 16 and one quarterfinal appearance (Fabio Fognini at Roland Garros 2011). Marco Cecchinato is the first Italian player in the semifinal of a Grand Slam in 40 years.

The following table shows all appearances of Italian players past the round of 16.

Tourney   Player	    	Reached
RG 18	  Marco Cecchinato  	SF
RG 11	  Fabio Fognini		QF
W  98	  Davide Sanguinetti 	QF
RG 95	  Renzo Furlan	     	QF
AO 91	  Cristiano Caratti  	QF
RG 80	  Corrado Barazzutti 	QF
W  79     Adriano Panatta	QF
RG 78	  Corrado Barazzutti	SF
UO 77	  Corrado Barazzutti	SF
RG 77	  Adriano Panatta	QF
RG 76	  Adriano Panatta	W
RG 75	  Adriano Panatta	SF
RG 73	  Paolo Bertolucci	QF
RG 73	  Adriano Panatta	SF
RG 72	  Adriano Panatta	QF

Despite the fact that male Italian players seem strongest on the dirt, since 1978 no one reached the semifinal of a Grand Slam. Even Fabio Fognini’s quarterfinal appearance at Roland Garros 2011 was the first in 13 years. Marco Cecchinato is one win away of being the first Italian Grand Slam finalist since 1976.

Marco Cecchinato was not seeded. If we look at Grand Slam semifinals comprised of unseeded players an interesting pattern appears.

Tourney Player  	    	Reached
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato  	SF
AO 18	Hyeon Chung		SF
AO 18	Kyle Edmund		SF
W  08	Rainer Schuettler	SF
W  08	Marat Safin		SF
RG 08	Gael Monfils		SF
AO 08	Jo Wilfried Tsonga	F
UO 06	Mikhail Youzhny		SF
W  06	Jonas Bjorkman		SF
AO 06	Marcos Baghdatis	F
UO 05	Robby Ginepri		SF
RG 05	Mariano Puerta		F
W  04	Mario Ancic		SF
RG 04	Gaston Gaudio		W
AO 04	Marat Safin		F
W  03	Mark Philippoussis	F
RG 03	Martin Verkerk		F
AO 03	Wayne Ferreira		SF
W  01	Goran Ivanisevic	W
UO 00	Todd Martin		SF
W  00	Vladimir Voltchkov	SF
RG 00	Franco Squillari	SF

Since 2008 this is only the third time that an unseeded player reached the semifinal. All three occurrences happended this year. It appears that we can again get used to see new faces deep into the second week of a Grand Slam tournament.

Finally, let’s take a look at Grand Slam semifinals between players using a one-handed backhand. The decreasing popularity of the one-hander has already been discussed here and with this in mind it seems even more unique that Dominic Thiem–the player who Marco Cecchinato will face tomorrow in the semifinal–inititally played a two-hander, but then changed to a one-hander.

Tourney Player 1	    	Player 2
RG 18	Marco Cecchinato  	Dominic Thiem
AO 17	Roger Federer		Stanislas Wawrinka
UO 15	Roger Federer		Stanislas Wawrinka
W  09	Roger Federer		Tommy Haas
W  07	Roger Federer		Richard Gasquet
AO 07	Fernando Gonzalez	Tommy Haas
UO 04	Roger Federer		Tim Henman
UO 02	Pete Sampras		Sjeng Schalken
RG 02	Albert Costa		Alex Corretja
W  99	Pete Sampras		Tim Henman
UO 98	Patrick Rafter		Pete Sampras
W  98	Pete Sampras		Tim Henman

If we ignore Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka, two players who brought the one-handed backhand back into discussion, the last Grand Slam semifinal between two one-handers was played between Fernando Gonzalez and Tommy Haas at the Australian Open 2007. Before that, Pete Sampras was involved in four of six such encounters. Without Roger and Pete the world of one-handed Grand Slam semifinals would look really thin.

Whatever the result of the semifinal between Marco Cecchinato and Dominic Thiem will be, we know already that Marco achieved what only few players have done before him, especially in recent years. Whether he will be able to repeat this feat at Wimbledon, where he will be seeded despite having never won a match on a grass court, is arguable. Still, placing a bet on his own first round loss probably won’t be a good idea–at the very least, a lot more fans will be watching his opening match than ever before.

* A previous version of this article wrongly stated that the Wimbledon 2001 championship run by Goran Ivanisevic is more similar to Marco Cecchinato’s run. However, in 2001 Ivanisevic had already achieved his career high ranking, which is not the case for Cecchinato. Thanks for @rtwkr at Twitter for pointing this out.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.