BACKING THE SERVER
Some people like this trade, but it’s
definitely not a personal favourite of mine.
It revolves around
backing a good server when serving and is based on the premise that you get
likely, small profits, as opposed to less likely, bigger profits that you get
from laying a server.
However, this strategy is not viable for
me for several reasons.
Firstly, I don’t
like the risk/reward ratio. Surely it is better to have some small losses and
big gains than small gains and bigger losses, even though the gains are more
frequent in this strategy? Depending on the set and the stage of the set, a
break of serve can cost you well in excess of 70 ticks so why would you want to
expose yourself to that level of risk?
Secondly, the
market is much more aware of the ‘big servers’ that this method requires than
the bad servers that laying bad servers needs. For example, a typical ‘bad
player vs bad player’ match tends to feature below average service holds
because those players tend to have stronger return games than service games –
therefore it is less known that the projected holds for a match or player will
be low, than it is for a big server to be high.
An example of that
is the Lukasz Kubot v Maxime Teixeira match in the 1st round of the
French Open on the 28th May, 2013. Kubot is an ATP journeyman with a pretty poor record on
clay. Teixeira plays most of his tennis on the lower level Challenger and ITF
tours and qualified for this match. Kubot started at 1.41 for this match, and
that was perhaps a little generous based on the projected holds.
Kubot on
clay in ATP matches in the last 12 months has held serve 69.5% of the time from
12 matches. This is well below the current ATP mean clay hold percentage of
75.9% - yet he is not regarded as a true ‘bad server’. Teixeira has little ATP
experience but looking at his Challenger tour record and adjusting it
accordingly, it would give him an average ATP hold of
57.2%. Again, very low. He may not be a necessarily bad server (I’ve
never actually seen him play before!) but because his game is generally so
limited at the highest level he will struggle to hold serve.
Here the final projected hold percentages worked out to be 70.1% for
Kubot and 55.9% for Teixeira. Therefore we have found a match with low projected
holds, simply because of the low quality of the two players, which may fly
under most people’s radars.
In the
match, there were 42 service games, 21 for each player. Kubot had 21 break
points (well above the 0.59 break points to game ratio) and broke 8 times from
the 21 Teixeira service games (61.9% hold for Teixeira – so my pre-match maths
was pretty solid). However, despite being favourite, Kubot himself gave 11
break point chances to Teixeira (0.52 break points per game ratio which is not
far from the ATP mean – and is still a good stat considering Kubot started 1.4
favourite) and Teixeira took 6 of those. That meant Kubot held 71.0% of his
service games, almost exactly the same as his projected hold of 70.1%.
Effectively I
managed to pick a match where projected holds were low, but didn’t feature a
notorious ‘bad server’ such as Volandri, Kavcic, or Kamke, for example.
And that, in essence, is the exact
problem of backing a good server when serving.
The good servers are notorious.
Ask any tennis fan
who a good server is, and the same names crop up. Isner. Raonic. Anderson.
Querrey. Janowicz. Karlovic. Backing these players would give no edge because
even someone with basic tennis knowledge knows that these players are more
likely to hold serve than Volandri, Kavcic or Kamke. So clearly the market will
too.
For this strategy
to have any chance of working (if you weren’t too bothered about the poor
risk/reward ratio!) you will need to find players who have a high projected
hold percentage but aren’t known ‘big servers’. This could possibly be someone
who has a reasonably solid serve (perhaps several percent above the ATP mean)
but is playing someone with an extremely limited return game (especially on a
given surface).
For example, Denis
Istomin on clay has, in my opinion, exactly that. He has broken serve a mere
12% in his 13 clay matches in 2013, well below the ATP mean of 24.1%. Other
non-notorious big serving players with low break percentages on clay from a
reasonable sample in 2013 include Bernard Tomic, Jurgen Melzer, Andrey
Kuznetsov, Philipp Kohlschreiber and Martin Alund. Also Igor Sijsling has
broken just 16% across all surfaces from his 20 matches in 2013.
Therefore backing
solid but not notoriously strong servers against poor returners like these
could be a possible area to look at for this strategy.
Generally, I much
prefer backing good servers in-game when losing in that game. I will examine
that topic further in the ‘in-game trades 1 – backing the good server’ chapter.
No comments