Category: Trivia

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.

Trivia: Deja Vu All Over Again

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the last several days, Fernando Verdasco has seen a little too much of Diego Schwartzman. On Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, the two players met in the final of the 500-level clay court event, which Schwartzman won in straight sets. Both players immediately headed for the hard court tournament in Acapulco, where they drew each other in the first round. Verdasco lost again, this time winning six games instead of five.

The odds of this sort of final-to-first-round scenario, with back-to-back matches against the same opponent, is quite rare, and the surface switch makes this one even more unlikely. For one thing, the tour doesn’t move from one court type to another very frequently, and when they do, players don’t always travel through the same sequence of events. Another cause of improbability is that a pair of players who contest a final are usually pretty good, meaning that both of them are often seeded at their next event, making a first-round meeting impossible. In order to see a pair of consecutive matches like Schwartzman’s and Verdasco’s, we require synchronized schedules and a hefty helping of luck.

As Carl Bialik pointed out, this isn’t the first time Verdasco has played back-to-back matches in February against the same opponent, albeit on the same surface: He did so in 2011, dropping the San Jose final and then a Memphis first-rounder to Milos Raonic. Remarkably, when we broaden the search a bit, Verdasco’s name comes up twice more. In 2009, he lost to Radek Stepanek in the Brisbane final, then in his next event, the Australian Open, he beat Stepanek in the third round. (Radek played Sydney in the meantime, for what it’s worth.) And five years later, Verdasco overcame Nicolas Almagro to win the 2014 Houston title, then faced his countryman in his next event two weeks later, losing to Almagro in the round of 16. (Again, while they were back-to-back tourneys for Verdasco, Nico squeezed in a few matches in Monte Carlo in between.)

Back to the matter at hand: In the course of five decades of Open Era men’s tennis, just about everything has happened at least once before. But this exact scenario–two guys facing each other in a final, then a first round match the very next week on a different surface–is a new one. Relax any one of those constraints, and we see a few instances in the past.

Since 1970, there have been about 3,750 tour-level finals. Roughly one-third of the time, the two finalists ended up playing each other at least once more over the course of the season. 197 of those pairs drew each other in their very next event, and in another 62 of the finals, one of the players faced the other in his next tournament (though the other had played an event or two in the meantime, like Almagro and Stepanek). Several of the 197 duos played each other the next week, though it is a bit more common that there was a week off in between.

Of the 197 finalist pairs, 25 of them drew each other in the round of 32 or earlier in their following tournament, though not all of those were first-round matches. (Or, in the case of Andy Murray and Philipp Kohlschreiber in 2015 after contesting the Munich final, they played in Murray’s first Madrid match the following week but not Kohlschreiber’s, since Murray had a bye.) The most common round in which finalists met again was another final, which ensued about one-third of the time.

Dividing up the 197 pairs a different way, about one-fifth (39) played the follow-up match on a different surface. In only a few of these instances were the two surfaces hard and clay; a disproportionate number of these back-to-back matches happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, when carpet was regular feature on tour, so the hard-to-carpet or carpet-to-hard transition shows up in these results much more frequently than hard-to-clay or clay-to-hard. For any pair of surfaces in these 39 matches, only three occured in the round of 32, and none in the round of 64 or 128.

The three precedents for Schwartzman’s back-to-back wins all have several things in common. First, like Diego’s feat, the same player won both matches. The other two are unlike the Schwartzman double: In each case, there was a one-week break between the tournaments and one of the events was played on carpet.

The first similar achievement was recorded by Tom Gorman, who won consecutive matches against Bob Carmichael in 1976. The first was the Sacramento final (on carpet), followed by the first round in Las Vegas (on hard). Next up was Martin Jaite‘s pair of wins over Javier Sanchez in 1989. After triumphing in the Sao Paulo final (on carpet), Jaite won a hard-court first-rounder against the same opponent two weeks later. Finally, Fernando Gonzalez defeated Jose Acususo twice in a row in 2002, first in the clay-court final in Palermo, then a bit more than a week later on carpet in the first round in Lyon.

Like Schwartzman and his three closest predecessors, most of the finalists managed to defend their victory. Of the different-surface instances, the same player won both matches 26 of 39 times. When the two matches took place on the same surface, the title winner won the next match 101 of 158 times. Most recently, Yuichi Sugita failed to do so: After beating Adrian Mannarino for his first tour-level title in Antalya last summer, he met the Frenchman again in the Wimbledon second round and lost. In a more notable exception, Andre Agassi knocked out Petr Korda for the 1991 Washington title, then lost to Korda in his first match the next week in Montreal. (It wasn’t Korda’s first match, as he didn’t get a bye like Agassi did, but the extra effort paid off. The Czech reached the final.)

We could wait fifty years for an exact parallel of Schwartzman’s feat. Or we could set the bar a little lower and see a rematch almost immediately: Another of last week’s finalist pairs, Lucas Pouille and Karen Khachanov, followed up their Marseille title match with another meeting in the Dubai second round only three days later. Regardless of which standard you choose, there’s one person who would surely prefer to take a break from consecutive matches against the same opponent, and that’s Fernando Verdasco.

Andrey Kuznetsov and Career Highs of ATP Non-Semifinalists

When following this week’s ATP 250 tournament in Winston-Salem and seeing Andrey Kuznetsov in the quarterfinals the following question arose: Will he finally make it into the first ATP semifinal of his career? As shown here Andrey – with a ranking of 42 – is currently (by far) the best-ranked player who has not reached an ATP SF. And it looks as if he will stay on top of this list for some time longer after losing to Pablo Carreno Busta 4-6 3-6 on Wednesday.

With stats of 0-10 in ATP quarterfinals, he is still pretty far away from Teymuraz Gabashvili‘s streak of 0-16. Despite having lost six more quarterfinals before winning his first QF this January against a retiring Bernard Tomic, Teymuraz climbed only to a ranking of 50. Still, we could argue that the QF losing-streak of Teymuraz is not really over after having won against a possibly injured player.

Running the numbers can answer questions such as “Who could climb up highest in the rankings without having won an ATP quarterfinal?” Doing so will put Andrey’s number 42 into perspective and will possibly reveal some other statistical trivia.

Player                Rank            Date   On
Andrei Chesnokov        30      1986.11.03    1
Yen Hsun Lu             33      2010.11.01    1
Nick Kyrgios            34      2015.04.06    1
Adrian Voinea           36      1996.04.15    1
Paul Haarhuis           36      1990.07.09    1
Jaime Yzaga             40      1986.03.03    1
Antonio Zugarelli       41      1973.08.23    1
Bernard Tomic           41      2011.11.07    1
Omar Camporese          41      1989.10.09    1
Wayne Ferreira          41      1991.12.02    1
Andrey Kuznetsov        42      2016.08.22    0
David Goffin            42      2012.10.29    1
Mischa Zverev           45      2009.06.08    1
Alexandr Dolgopolov     46      2010.06.07    1
Andrew Sznajder         46      1989.09.25    1
Lukas Rosol             46      2013.04.08    1
Ulf Stenlund            46      1986.07.07    1
Dominic Thiem           47      2014.07.21    1
Janko Tipsarevic        47      2007.07.16    1
Paul Annacone           47      1985.04.08    1
Renzo Furlan            47      1991.06.17    1
Mike Fishbach           47      1978.01.16    0
Oscar Hernandez         48      2007.10.08    1
Ronald Agenor           48      1985.11.25    1
Gary Donnelly           48      1986.11.10    0
Francisco Gonzalez      49      1978.07.12    1
Paolo Lorenzi           49      2013.03.04    1
Boris Becker            50      1985.05.06    1
Brett Steven            50      1993.02.15    1
Dominik Hrbaty          50      1997.05.19    1
Mike Leach              50      1985.02.18    1
Patrik Kuhnen           50      1988.08.01    1
Teymuraz Gabashvili     50      2015.07.20    1
Blaine Willenborg       50      1984.09.10    0

The table shows career highs (up until #50) for players before they won their first ATP QF. A 0 in the last column indicates that the player can still climb up in this table, because he did not win a QF, yet. There may also be retired players being denoted with a 0, because they never managed to get past a QF during their career.

I wonder, who had Andrei Chesnokov on the radar for this? Before winning his first ATP QF he pushed his ranking as far as 30. He later went on to have a career high of 9. Nick Kyrgios could also improve his ranking quickly without the need to go as deep as a SF. His Wimbledon 2014 QF, Roland Garros 2015 R32, and Australian Open 2015 QF runs helped him to get up until #34 without a single win at an ATP QF. Also, I particularly would like to highlight Alexandr Dolgopolov who reached #46 before having even played a single QF.

Looking only at players who are still active and able to up their ranking without an ATP SF we get the following picture:

Player                 Rank            Date
Andrey Kuznetsov         42      2016.08.22
Rui Machado              59      2011.10.03
Tatsuma Ito              60      2012.10.22
Matthew Ebden            61      2012.10.01
Kenny De Schepper        62      2014.04.07
Pere Riba                65      2011.05.16
Tim Smyczek              68      2015.04.06
Blaz Kavcic              68      2012.08.06
Alejandro Gonzalez       70      2014.06.09

Andrey seems to be relatively alone with Rui Machado being second in the list having reached his highest ranking already about five years ago. Skimming through the remainder of the table, we would be surprised if anyone soon would be able to come close to Andrey’s 42, which doesn’t mean that a sudden unexpected streak of an upcoming player would render this scenario impossible.

So what practical implications does this give us for analyzing tennis? Hardly any, I am afraid. Still, we can infer that it is possible to get well within the top-50 without winning more than two matches at a single tournament over a duration that can even range over a player’s whole career. Of course it would be interesting to see how long such players can stay in these ranking areas, guaranteeing direct acceptance into ATP tournaments and, hence, a more or less regular income from R32, R16, and QF prize money. Moreover, as the case of 2015-ish Nick Kyrgios shows, the question arises how one’s ranking points are composed: Performing well at the big stage of Masters or Grand Slams can be enough for a decent ranking while showing poor performance at ATP 250s. On the other hand, are there players whose ATP points breakdown reveals that they are willing to go for easier points at ATP 250s while never having deep runs at Masters or Grand Slams? These are questions which I would like to answer in a future post.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria. I would like to thank Jeff for being open-minded and allowing me to post these surface-scratching lines here.

Tommy Robredo and the Men Who Beat Number One

Today in Cincinnati, Tommy Robredo took out the top-ranked player in the world, Novak Djokovic, in straight sets. Robredo has had a fine career, peaking in the top five and beating many of the world’s best, but it was only the second time in eight tries that he managed to defeat a reigning world number one.

The first time Robredo accomplished the feat was more than eleven years ago, at the 2003 French Open, where he upset Lleyton Hewitt in five sets. Since then, his only chances to beat number ones have come against Roger Federer, and he lost in all five tries. When the Spaniard finally scored a win over Fed in New York last year, Roger had long since fallen out of the top spot.

With today’s win, Robredo becomes the 66th man since the advent of the ATP ranking system who has beaten at least two different number ones. Only 13 active players have managed the feat.

23 players in ATP history have beaten at least three players who were ranked number one at the time. Coincidentally, the man who defeated the most number ones was present at today’s match. Boris Becker upset six different players in the top spot, compiling a very impressive 19-16 career record against players ranked number one.

Next on the list is Michael Chang, who beat five different number ones (though he only won 7 of 27 matches against them), while Federer, Andre Agassi, Greg Rusedski, and Dominik Hrbaty beat four. Four more active players have defeated three number ones: Andy Murray , David Ferrer, Juan Martin del Potro, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Each of those four recorded their upsets against Rafael Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer, except for Ferrer, who has never beaten Fed but did defeat Agassi when the American held the top spot.

Becker’s 19 wins against top-ranked players is also a record, though he has to share this one with Nadal, who is 19-10 against number ones. Boris and Rafa tower far above the next players on the list, Djokovic and Bjorn Borg, who each have 11 career wins against number ones. Next on the list among active players are Murray (9), del Potro (6), Ferrer (5), and Federer (5).

Robredo doesn’t quite rank among this elite company, but his second top-ranked scalp adds a little more luster to an already lengthy list of career highlights.

ATP Single-Country Finals in the Open Era

Today’s Washington final between Milos Raonic and Vasek Pospisil is the first all-Canadian final in the Open era. Here’s a list of the other 20 countries that have represented both sides of an ATP final, along with the total number of such finals and the most recent such match: