One common strategy that many bettors follow in tennis is backing the favorite in any given match. While you might see bookmakers’ odds, even those of new bookmakers in Australia, not being particularly attractive for those favored to win, several punters choose to go down this road as it appears to be less risky and more sustainable for the future. Other bettors, who are more risk tolerant and who are interested in bigger payouts, chose to make longshots and wait for an upset to happen.
While favorite betting and underdog betting seem to be strategies chosen in advance by the bettors, we will explain here why they should not be uniformly employed, rather they should be a la carte! The win rates of favs and dogs change in tennis tournaments and the thing is that they change both across tours and within tours. Let’s see why it is so and what are the implications on sports betting.
Across tours
One of the really interesting things about tennis is that although it is considered to be a very volatile and dynamic sport it is also a very predictable one – at least when it comes to forecasting the winner of a tennis match. Favorites’ win rates in tennis are among the highest ones in the whole realm of sports across the world, sometimes reaching up to 80%. So, when favorites get to win at most up to 65-70% in some sports, tennis enjoys an incredibly high percentage, if we consider that often 8 out of 10 matches end up with the victory of the pre-game favorite.
But what is even more interesting than that is that the win rate of the favored tennis players is not consistent across tours and competitions. There is a great variation from tour to tour and this makes predicting the winner and getting a winning bet a somehow more complicated procedure.
Grand Slam tours are more fertile grounds for the best players. In fact, the favorites to win a match have considerably more chances of scoring a victory in a Wimbledon or Rolland Garros match, let’s say than in a Madrid Open or Miami Open match.
The difference in win rate might be because Grand Slam events are much more demanding, stressful, and pressuring and this is definitely to the advantage of the most experienced, the most capable and generally the best tennis players.
But it’s not the event per se that makes so much difference, as the format of the event. Grand Slams feature the Best of 5 Sets format, while all other ATP tours feature the Best of 3 rule.
This means that Grand Slam matches are more physically challenging on the one hand and on the other hand they eventually phase out any other random variable that would influence the result. The more sets that the best players get to play, the more they increase their win probability and reduce any variance.
So, if you want to bet on the favored player to win a match with one of the best new betting sites such as Megapari, you need first to consider the event and then search for more information about statistical evidence on the win rates of favs. If you are to make an informed decision, assess all relevant data and place your wager.
Within tours
The incredible thing with tennis is that the win rates of favs (and dogs respectively) are not only inconsistent across tours but also within tours. As a tour progresses and as we go down the rounds, the win rates get to change.
We see favored players having lower win rates, while dogs spiking their own rates. As we move forward the rounds, the outsiders or simply the less favored players to win a match eventually make upsets and have more probabilities of beating their opponents. This happens in all competitions, irrespective of the tour. It makes no difference if we are talking about the 4th round of the Australian Open or the fourth round of the Indian Wells. In both cases, dogs get to increase their chances of winning compared to favorites.
There is a simple explanation for that, which makes complete sense. As we go through the rounds, approximating the semi-finals and the finals, those who have managed to stay in the tournament are not the rookies or the possibly inexperienced players who appeared in the first round – or even the second round. As the tour progresses, we get to have better and better players in the matches against the top seeds and this by definition reduces the win rates of the favorites and increases the win rates of the underdogs.
This can have two readings, betting-wise. First, punters should seriously consider favorite betting early in the tournament, most likely in the first two stages, while they should watch closely the dogs for the subsequent rounds. Second, punters should avoid the early favorites of semi-finals and finals, because as we go down the road the same favorites will come with better odds since their chances might get smaller!
