With the field of eight divided into two round-robin groups for the WTA Tour Finals in Singapore, we can play around with some forecasts for this event. I’ve updated my Elo ratings through last week’s tournaments, and the first thing that jumps out is how different they are from the official rankings.<\/p>\n
Here’s the Singapore field:<\/p>\n
EloRank Player Elo Group \n2 Maria Sharapova 2296 RED \n4 Simona Halep 2181 RED \n6 Garbine Muguruza 2147 WHITE \n8 Petra Kvitova 2136 WHITE \n9 Angelique Kerber 2129 WHITE \n11 Agnieszka Radwanska 2100 RED \n15 Lucie Safarova 2051 WHITE \n21 Flavia Pennetta 2004 RED<\/pre>\nSerena Williams<\/a>\u00a0(#1 in just about every imaginable ranking system) chose not to play, but if Elo ruled the day, Belinda Bencic<\/a>, Venus Williams<\/a>, and Victoria Azarenka<\/a> would be playing this week in place of Agnieszka Radwanska<\/a>, Lucie Safarova<\/a>, and Flavia Pennetta<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Anyway, we’ll work with what we’ve got. Maria Sharapova<\/a> is, according to Elo, a huge favorite here. The ratings translate into a forecast that looks like this:<\/p>\n
Player SF Final Title \nMaria Sharapova 83.7% 61.1% 43.6% \nSimona Halep 60.8% 35.4% 15.9% \nGarbine Muguruza 59.4% 25.7% 11.3% \nPetra Kvitova 55.2% 23.0% 9.8% \nAngelique Kerber 53.1% 21.7% 8.8% \nAgnieszka Radwanska 37.4% 17.4% 6.1% \nLucie Safarova 32.3% 9.7% 3.1% \nFlavia Pennetta 18.1% 6.0% 1.4%<\/pre>\nIf Sharapova is really that good, the loser in today’s draw was Simona Halep<\/a>. The top seed would typically benefit from having the second seed in the other group, but because\u00a0Garbine Muguruza<\/a>\u00a0recently took over the third spot in the rankings, Pova entered the draw as a dangerous floater.<\/p>\n
However, these ratings don’t reflect the fact\u00a0that Sharapova hasn’t completed a match since Wimbledon. They don’t decline with inactivity, so Pova’s rating is the same as it was the day after she lost to Serena back in July. (My algorithm also excludes retirements, so her attempted return in Wuhan isn’t considered.)<\/p>\n
With as little as we know about Sharapova’s health, it’s tough to know how to tweak her rating. For lack of any better ideas, I revised her Elo rating to 2132, right between Petra Kvitova<\/a> and Angelique Kerber<\/a>. At her best, Sharapova is better than that, but consider this a way of factoring in the substantial possibility that she’ll play much, much worse–or that she’ll get injured and her matches will be played by Carla Suarez Navarro<\/a> instead. The revised forecast:<\/p>\n
Player SF Final Title \nSimona Halep 69.9% 40.9% 24.0% \nGarbine Muguruza 59.4% 31.5% 16.5% \nMaria Sharapova 57.6% 29.5% 14.5% \nPetra Kvitova 55.6% 28.4% 14.4% \nAngelique Kerber 52.5% 26.3% 13.2% \nAgnieszka Radwanska 47.9% 22.3% 9.9% \nLucie Safarova 32.6% 12.9% 4.9% \nFlavia Pennetta 24.7% 8.3% 2.7%<\/pre>\nIf this is a reasonably accurate estimate of Sharapova’s current ability, the Red group suddenly looks like the right place to be. Because Elo doesn’t give any particular weight to Grand Slams, it suggests that the official rankings far overestimate the current level of Safarova and Pennetta. The weakness of those two makes Halep a very likely semifinalist and also means that, in this forecast, the winner of the tournament is more likely (54% to 46%) to come from the White group.<\/p>\n
Without Serena, and with Sharapova’s health in question, there are simply no dominant players in the field this week. If nothing else, these forecasts illustrate that we’d be foolish to take any Singapore predictions too seriously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the field of eight divided into two round-robin groups for the WTA Tour Finals in Singapore, we can play around with some forecasts for this event. I’ve updated my Elo ratings through last week’s tournaments, and the first thing that jumps out is how different they are from the official rankings. Here’s the Singapore … Continue reading Elo-Forecasting the WTA Tour Finals in Singapore<\/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":[32,40,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elo-ratings","category-forecasting","category-wta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901","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=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}