BACKING THE SERVER

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.

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