{"id":2056,"date":"2016-11-13T09:53:53","date_gmt":"2016-11-13T09:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=2056"},"modified":"2016-11-13T09:53:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-13T09:53:53","slug":"forecasting-the-2016-atp-world-tour-finals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/13\/forecasting-the-2016-atp-world-tour-finals\/","title":{"rendered":"Forecasting the 2016 ATP World Tour Finals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it<\/a><\/p>\n

Andy Murray<\/a> is the #1 seed this week in London, but as I wrote for The Economist<\/a>, Novak Djokovic<\/a> likely remains the best player in the world. According to my Elo ratings<\/a>, he would have a 63% chance of winning a head-to-head match between the two. And with the added benefit of an easier round-robin\u00a0draw, the math heavily favors Djokovic to win the tournament.<\/p>\n

Here are the results of a Monte Carlo simulation of the draw:<\/p>\n

Player        SF      F      W  \nDjokovic   95.3%  73.9%  54.6%  \nMurray     86.3%  58.3%  29.7%  \nNishikori  60.4%  24.9%   7.8%  \nRaonic     50.9%  16.3%   3.3%  \nWawrinka   29.4%   7.8%   1.6%  \nMonfils    33.2%   8.7%   1.4%  \nCilic      23.9%   5.8%   1.1%  \nThiem      20.7%   4.1%   0.5%<\/pre>\n
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player favored so heavily to progress out of the group stage. Murray’s 86% chance of doing so is quite high in itself; Novak’s 95% is otherworldly. His head-to-heads against the other players in his group<\/a> are backed up by major differences in Elo points–Dominic Thiem<\/a> is a lowly 15th on the Elo list, given only a 7.4% chance of beating the Serb.<\/p>\n
If Milos Raonic<\/a> is unable to compete, Djokovic’s chances climb even higher. Here are the probabilities if David Goffin<\/a> takes Raonic’s place in the bracket:<\/p>\n
Player        SF      F      W  \nDjokovic   96.8%  75.2%  55.4%  \nMurray     86.2%  60.7%  30.6%  \nNishikori  60.7%  26.3%   8.1%  \nMonfils    47.7%  12.4%   1.8%  \nWawrinka   29.3%   8.5%   1.7%  \nCilic      23.8%   6.2%   1.1%  \nThiem      29.5%   5.8%   0.7%  \nGoffin     26.0%   4.9%   0.5%<\/pre>\n
The luck of the draw was on Novak’s side. I ran another simulation with Djokovic and Murray swapping groups. Here, Djokovic is still heavily favored to win the tournament, but Murray’s semifinal chances get a sizable boost:<\/p>\n
Player        SF      F      W  \nDjokovic   92.8%  75.1%  54.9%  \nMurray     90.9%  58.1%  29.8%  \nNishikori  58.4%  26.9%   7.5%  \nRaonic     52.3%  14.3%   3.3%  \nWawrinka   26.9%   8.4%   1.6%  \nMonfils    35.3%   7.5%   1.4%  \nCilic      21.9%   6.2%   1.0%  \nThiem      21.6%   3.4%   0.5%<\/pre>\n
Elo rates Djokovic so highly that he is favored no matter what the draw. But the draw certainly helped.<\/p>\n
Doubles!<\/strong><\/p>\n
I’ve finally put together\u00a0a sufficient doubles dataset to generate Elo ratings and tournament forecasts for ATP doubles. While I’m not quite ready to go into detail, I can say that, by using the Elo algorithm and rating players individually, the resulting forecasts outperform the ATP rankings about as much as singles Elo ratings do.<\/p>\n
Here is the forecast for the doubles event at the World Tour Finals:<\/p>\n
Team               SF      F      W  \nHerbert\/Mahut   76.4%  49.5%  32.1%  \nBryan\/Bryan     68.7%  36.8%  19.9%  \nKontinen\/Peers  55.7%  29.1%  13.8%  \nDodig\/Melo      58.4%  28.1%  13.2%  \nMurray\/Soares   48.3%  20.8%   8.6%  \nLopez\/Lopez     37.7%  16.4%   6.2%  \nKlaasen\/Ram     30.2%  11.9%   4.0%  \nHuey\/Mirnyi     24.6%   7.3%   2.2%<\/pre>\n
This distribution is more like what round-robin forecasts usually look like, without a massive gap between the top of the field and the rest. Pierre-Hugues Herbert<\/a> and Nicolas Mahut<\/a> are the top rated team, followed closely by Bob Bryan<\/a> and Mike Bryan<\/a>. Max Mirnyi<\/a> was, at his peak, one of the highest Elo-rated doubles players, but his pairing with Treat Huey<\/a> is the weakest of the bunch.<\/p>\n
The men’s doubles bracket\u00a0has some legendary names, along with some players–like Herbert and Henri Kontinen<\/a>–who may develop into all-time greats, but it has no competitors who loom over the rest of the field like Murray and Djokovic do in singles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian translation at settesei.it Andy Murray is the #1 seed this week in London, but as I wrote for The Economist, Novak Djokovic likely remains the best player in the world. According to my Elo ratings, he would have a 63% chance of winning a head-to-head match between the two. And with the added benefit … Continue reading Forecasting the 2016 ATP World Tour Finals<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[31,32,40,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doubles","category-elo-ratings","category-forecasting","category-world-tour-finals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056","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=2056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}