{"id":1096,"date":"2013-02-23T11:21:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-23T16:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2013-02-23T11:21:31","modified_gmt":"2013-02-23T16:21:31","slug":"jerzy-janowicz-and-the-frequency-of-tiebreak-shutouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/23\/jerzy-janowicz-and-the-frequency-of-tiebreak-shutouts\/","title":{"rendered":"Jerzy Janowicz and the Frequency of Tiebreak Shutouts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Marseille this week<\/a>, Jerzy Janowicz<\/a> played two dominant tiebreaks. \u00a0In his second-round win over Julien Benneteau<\/a>, he put away the first set with a 7-0 breaker en route to a straight-set victory. \u00a0In the quarterfinals, he won another 7-0 tiebreak to even his match with Tomas Berdych<\/a> before falling in three.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, this is not the first time anyone on the ATP tour has won two tiebreaks by a score of 7-0 in back-to-back matches. \u00a0It is, however, the first time it’s been done in best-of-3 matches. \u00a0In 1992, Brad Gilbert<\/a> won both his 2nd- and 3rd-round contests at the US Open in five sets, winning 7-0 tiebreaks in the 5th set both times<\/a>. \u00a0If that’s not a case for fifth-set tiebreaks at slams, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n

Janowicz’s accomplishment and Gilbert’s feat are the only two times\u00a0anyone on tour has won two shutout breakers\u00a0in the same event<\/em>. \u00a0That’s not much of a surprise, since there are typically fewer than 25 such tiebreaks at tour level per year.<\/p>\n

What’s particularly odd here is that Jerzy’s two shutouts weren’t the only ones in Marseille. \u00a0In the first round, wild card Lucas Pouille<\/a> was 7-0’d by Benneteau, the same guy who Janowicz victimized first. Weirdly, both losing and winning 7-0 breakers in the same event is slightly more common than winning two. \u00a0It has happened three times before, most recently at the 2009 Belgrade event by Lukasz Kubot<\/a>, who shut out Karlovic in a semifinal tiebreak then got 7-0’d by Novak Djokovic<\/a> in the final.<\/p>\n

Finally, while we’re wallowing in trivia, here’s one more. \u00a0Only once has a player\u00a0lost<\/em> two 7-0 tiebreaks at the same event. \u00a0This is quite the feat, because to pull it off, you have to win the first match despite losing a set in painful fashion. \u00a0The only man to do it is Simone Bollelli<\/a>, who beat Dmitri Tursunov<\/a> in the 2nd round of the 2007 Miami Masters despite losing the first set in a 7-0 tiebreak<\/a>, then lost in the 3rd to David Ferrer<\/a>, who threw in another tiebreak bagel on the way to straight-set win.<\/p>\n

Rare, but not rare enough<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shutout tiebreaks don’t occur very often, but they occur more often than we might expect. \u00a0On tour since 1991, there have been 30,259 tiebreaks, and 524 of them–about 1.7%–have been by the score of 7-0. \u00a0That’s barely more than the number that end 11-9.<\/p>\n

However, if we assume that players who reach a tiebreak are reasonably equal, that’s almost double the frequency we would expect. \u00a0A discrepancy like that has serious implications about player consistency.<\/p>\n

The arithmetic here is simple. \u00a0Say that both players have a 70% chance of winning a point on serve. \u00a0In order to win a tiebreak 7-0, the player who serves first must win three points serving and four points returning. \u00a0The probability of pulling that off is about (0.7^3)(0.3^4) = 0.28%. \u00a0It’s easier if you serve second. \u00a0You must win four points serving and three returning:\u00a0(0.7^4)(0.3^3) = 0.65%. \u00a0In this scenario, both players have equal skills, so each one has the same chance of winning 7-0, and the chance of the breaker ending in a shutout is the sum of those two probabilities, 0.93%.<\/p>\n

Of course, this simple model obscures a lot of things. \u00a0First, players who reach a tiebreak aren’t necessary equal. \u00a0Just last month, Bernard Tomic<\/a> got to 6-6 against Roger Federer<\/a>, and even more recently, Martin Alund<\/a> played a tiebreak against Rafael Nadal<\/a>. \u00a0Second, any competitor’s level of play fluctuates, and some guys seem to fluctuate quite a bit when the pressure is on.<\/p>\n

Still, the gap between predicted (no more than 0.93%) and observed (1.7%) is enormous. \u00a0To predict that 1.7% of tiebreaks would end in a 7-0, we’d need to start with much more extreme assumptions. \u00a0For instance, if one player is likely to win 77% of serve points and the other only 64% of serve points, the likelihood of a 7-0 tiebreak is 1.7%. \u00a0Those assumptions also imply that, if each man kept up the same level of play all day, the better player has a 93% chance of winning the match. \u00a0Perhaps true of Nadal\/Alund or even Federer\/Tomic, but certainly not Janowicz\/Benneteau or Janowicz\/Berdych, or most of the other matches that reach a tiebreak.<\/p>\n

This is all a roundabout way of saying that–breaking news!–players are inconsistent. Or streaky, or clutch, or unclutch … pick your favorite. \u00a0Were players machines, 7-0 tiebreaks wouldn’t come around nearly as often. \u00a0As it is, we shouldn’t expect more from Jerzy for a while … unless Brad Gilbert is planning a comeback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Marseille this week, Jerzy Janowicz played two dominant tiebreaks. \u00a0In his second-round win over Julien Benneteau, he put away the first set with a 7-0 breaker en route to a straight-set victory. \u00a0In the quarterfinals, he won another 7-0 tiebreak to even his match with Tomas Berdych before falling in three. Amazingly, this is … Continue reading Jerzy Janowicz and the Frequency of Tiebreak Shutouts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,93,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-hand","category-records","category-tiebreaks"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}