{"id":821,"date":"2012-07-27T11:18:28","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T15:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=821"},"modified":"2012-07-27T11:18:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T15:18:28","slug":"who-benefits-from-byes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/27\/who-benefits-from-byes\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Benefits From Byes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Roughly two-thirds of ATP tour-level tournaments have byes in the draw. \u00a031 events–including the two this week, in Kitzbuhel and Los Angeles–have 28-man fields, with first-round byes for the top four seeds.<\/p>\n

The obvious beneficiaries are the top four seeds. \u00a0They get free passes into the second round, eliminating the chance they’ll be handed a first-round exit. \u00a0It’s also a guarantee of greater prize money and more ranking points. \u00a0First-round byes are such a feature of the ATP tour, at least in part, because they help smaller tournaments convince big-name players to sign up.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can’t simply hand an advantage to the top four seeds without affecting others. \u00a0In this most common format, a 28-man field with eight seeds and four byes, there are three important groups: The top four seeds, the bottom four seeds, and the rest of the field.<\/p>\n

The top four seeds:\u00a0<\/strong>The main effect of byes on the top four seeds is that, as noted, they don’t have play first-round matches. \u00a0The extent of that effect depends on how much of a threat the first-rounder would’ve been.<\/p>\n

To quantify these effects, I ran simulations for the 2012 Estoril tournament<\/a>. \u00a0First, I simulated the draw as the tournament was played, with 28 players and top seeds of Juan Martin Del Potro<\/a>, Richard Gasquet<\/a>, Stanislas Wawrinka<\/a>, and Albert Ramos<\/a>. \u00a0Second, I added the next four players on the alternate list<\/a> to the draw in place of the byes. \u00a0To eliminate any bias stemming from the specific arrangement of the draw, I re-generated the brackets for each simulation.<\/p>\n

In the 32-man field, Delpo won his first round match about 90% of the time, Gasquet and Wawrinka about 80%, and Ramos just under 60%. \u00a0Accordingly, Delpo didn’t benefit too much from the bye, but Ramos gained enormously.<\/p>\n

However, when measured by expected ranking points, none of these four men gained as much as skipping the first round would suggest. \u00a0For instance, if Delpo would win only 90% of his first-round matches, removing that impediment would be expected to raise his other outcomes by (1\/0.9 – 1), or 11%. \u00a0In fact, in the 28-man simulation, he gained only 9.5% over his 32-man expectation.<\/p>\n

The slight difference is due to the other top seeds. \u00a0If Delpo is more likely to reach, say, the semifinals, then the same effect applies to Gasquet and Wawrinka, the two men who would be most likely to knock him out of the draw. \u00a0So while the bye itself increases Delpo’s expected ranking points by 11%, the increased probability of facing the other top seeds reduces it a bit.<\/p>\n

Still, the net effect on the top four seeds is overwhelmingly positive. \u00a0For Gasquet and Wawrinka, the bye itself increases their expectations by 27% each, for a net effect of 24%, while for Ramos, the bye is a 74% increase, resulting in a net effect of 70%.<\/p>\n

The next four seeds:\u00a0<\/strong>The men seeded five through eight are the losers. \u00a0They must play a first-round match–which, in the Estoril example, they each have about a 60% chance of winning–but they are more likely to face one of the top four seeds later on.<\/p>\n

The average effect of adding byes to the draw is a 5% decrease in expected ranking points for these lower four seeds. \u00a0They aren’t guaranteed to reach the quarterfinal, but in the 28-man version, if they do reach the quarters, they are at least 10% more likely to face a higher-ranked opponent.<\/p>\n

The rest of the pack:\u00a0<\/strong>Nearly everyone else benefits. \u00a0The effect of byes touches unseeded players in two ways, which work in opposite directions. \u00a0First, and most significantly, no one has to play a top-four seed in the first round. \u00a0In Estoril, the toughest first round opponent was 5th-seed Denis Istomin<\/a>, not exactly a fearsome name in the locker room. \u00a0Because of the byes, nearly every player has a 40% chance of reaching the second round.<\/p>\n

The countervailing force is a minor one–not enough to neutralize the advantage of missing top seeds in the first round. \u00a0When the field shrinks from 32 to 28, the average opponent is a bit better. \u00a0If four additional players were added to the Estoril field, they wouldn’t be automatically placed in the positions of the byes. \u00a0They would be randomly placed in the draw like everyone else. \u00a0Having those four lower-ranked players would give some players even easier first-round matches.<\/p>\n

But on balance, for unseeded players, the goal is simply to win a match or two. \u00a0The best way to increase their chances of doing so is to keep the best players out of their path for as long as possible. \u00a0Byes take care of that. \u00a0The net benefit to unseeded players is an addition of 1% to 3% of their expected ranking points. \u00a0Generally speaking, the worse the player, the bigger the benefit.<\/p>\n

The one exception to this rule is if an unseeded player is actually better than some of the seeds. \u00a0According to jrank<\/a>, Igor Andreev<\/a> was a better player than 8th-seed\u00a0Flavio Cipolla<\/a> going into Estoril. \u00a0Thus, the logic that applies to the bottom seeds applies to him. \u00a0He was likely to advance to the quarterfinals, so the effect of the byes was mainly to give him a tougher quarterfinal opponent. \u00a0In each tournament, this might affect one or two players–in Estoril, Andreev was the only one.<\/p>\n

One more consideration:\u00a0<\/strong>As we’ve seen, 23 of the 28 players benefited from the byes. \u00a0And the five players who were negatively affected didn’t lose too much. \u00a0How is that possible?<\/p>\n

There’s one more group we haven’t talked about: The four players who aren’t included in a 32-man draw. \u00a0They don’t have much of a chance of reaching the final rounds, but they wouldn’t be much worse than the rest of the unseeded pack.<\/p>\n

One of the players I used for this example, Igor Sijsling<\/a>, just missed the cut, but in a 32-man draw, he would have been expected to take home 23 ranking points and about $9,000. \u00a0By adding four byes, the tournament is essentially taking what it would have given to Sijsling and three other players and divvying it up among the remaining 28. \u00a0The pie is the same size, but fewer players can claim a slice.<\/p>\n

In the end, those four “missing” players are the only real losers, and they always have the option to head to a challenger for the chance of picking just as many points, even if they probably don’t come with as many dollars.<\/p>\n

The winners, beyond the top seeds and the tournament organizers, are ultimately the fans. \u00a0When top players have more reason to play small tournaments, we get to watch more high-profile matchups, and ATP 250s look a bit less like Kitzbuhel and a bit more like Doha.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it Roughly two-thirds of ATP tour-level tournaments have byes in the draw. \u00a031 events–including the two this week, in Kitzbuhel and Los Angeles–have 28-man fields, with first-round byes for the top four seeds. The obvious beneficiaries are the top four seeds. \u00a0They get free passes into the second round, eliminating the chance … Continue reading Who Benefits From Byes?<\/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":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","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=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}