{"id":4340,"date":"2021-03-29T19:12:59","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T19:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/?p=4340"},"modified":"2021-03-29T19:12:59","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T19:12:59","slug":"love-six-no-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/29\/love-six-no-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Love-Six? No Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, Tsvetana Pironkova<\/a> dealt Aryna Sabalenka<\/a> a rough start to her Miami campaign: a 6-0 first set. It took two more hours and a third-set tiebreak to settle the issue, but ultimately Sabalenka came back, shrugging off the abysmal opening frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not the first time Sabalenka has completed such a comeback. In 2018, she overcame a bagel opener at the hands of Marketa Vondrousova<\/a> at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and famously, she recovered after losing the first 10<\/em> games in Ostrava last fall to Sara Sorribes Tormo<\/a>. She didn’t just claw her way back against the Spaniard, she won the next 12 in a row–not to mention her next 13 matches after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remarkably, these three matches are the only times Sabalenka has lost a first-set bagel at tour level. She’s won them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Context, please<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three-set comebacks are common in women’s tennis, but as you might guess, they are less common when the first set is a lopsided one. A 6-0 or 6-1 opener suggests either that the players are mismatched, or one of the competitors is having a particularly good or bad day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approximately one-third of matches go to a third set, and about one in six end up in favor of the woman who lost the first one. But when the opening frame is a bagel, those numbers are roughly halved–more than four in five of the matches are put away in straights, and fewer than 8% of the 0-6 losers complete the comeback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are the numbers for every opening set score, drawing on all WTA tour-level matches since 2000:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Score  p(3 Sets)  p(Win)  \n0-6        18.6%    7.5%  \n1-6        24.3%   10.9%  \n2-6        29.3%   14.4%  \n3-6        33.2%   17.4%  \n4-6        37.1%   21.0%  \n5-7        36.0%   20.1%  \n6-7        39.7%   22.7%  \nTotal      32.0%   16.8%<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
All else equal, losers of close first sets have a much better chance at coming back than those who drop lopsided openers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About those 7.5%<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
All else is never equal, so it isn’t right to say that Sabalenka had a one-in-thirteen chance of coming back against Sorribes Tormo or Pironkova. A top player who loses an opening set is much more likely to bounce back than, say, Renata Zarazua<\/a>, the qualifier who lost 6-0 6-0 to Angelique Kerber<\/a> the same day as Aryna’s latest exploit. Zarazua isn’t that<\/em> bad, but the odds she’d win the last two sets were much worse than Sabalenka’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet in the 2000s, no one has done what the Belarussian has, winning all<\/em> of the matches in which she loses a love-six opening set. She’s three-for-three, and no one else is even two-for-two at tour level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sabalenka has a ways to go to catch Klara Koukalova<\/a>, who came back from a first-set bagel six times, more than anyone else on tour this century. It took her 24 tries, which still works out to an impressive conversion rate of 25%. By contrast, Sorana Cirstea has been first-set-bageled 19 times, and has yet to turn any of them around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are more meaningful aspects<\/a> of Sabalenka’s powerful and entertaining game, but at the moment, her perfect record after love-six openers is my favorite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, Tsvetana Pironkova dealt Aryna Sabalenka a rough start to her Miami campaign: a 6-0 first set. It took two more hours and a third-set tiebreak to settle the issue, but ultimately Sabalenka came back, shrugging off the abysmal opening frame. It’s not the first time Sabalenka has completed such a comeback. In 2018, … Continue reading Love-Six? No Problem<\/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":[11,117,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bagels-and-breadsticks","category-trivia","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\/4340","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=4340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}