Doubles Chaos, R2 Rigging, and the Threat of Watson

Today Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan open up their title defense in Flushing.  They’ve won four Grand Slams in a row, so winning this one would give them a calendar-year Slam, one of the few accomplishments they don’t already have in their pockets.

What makes this so impressive to me is the unpredictability of men’s doubles results, not to mention the utter chaos that reigns these days in the sport.  As I wrote after last year’s surprise Wimbledon results, men’s doubles is so heavily serve oriented that it often comes down to a tiebreak or two.  For most teams, that means that winning a tournament is roughly equivalent to guessing right on a series of coin flips.

For the Bryans to remain so dominant, they need to break serves that are rarely broken and win plenty of the tiebreaks that ensue when they don’t.  Roughly speaking, it’s as if John Isner stopped getting broken and improved his already impressive record in 7-6 sets.

Before the rain struck, yesterday provided a case in point of how good teams can easily suffer a bad loss.  Max Mirnyi and Horia Tecau make up one of the few teams that has remained together lately.  They aren’t unbeatable, but both are very good doubles players.  In their first-rounder yesterday, they lost in straight sets to Pablo Cuevas and Horacio Zeballos.  Yes, both of their opponents have strong doubles resumes, but Cuevas has been injured for what seems like years, and Zeballos was sick.  And neither plays nearly as much doubles as Mirnyi and Tecau do.

That sort of thing happens at every tournament.  We’ll see more of it in the next two days.  Somehow, it seems only the Bryans are immune.

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Remember a couple years ago, when ESPN thought they discovered that the US Open was rigging the draw in favor of the top two seeds?  They weren’t, but tournament favorites have gotten a lot of easy first-round matches over the years.

While it’s surely just an accident, one can’t help think about it when looking at the men’s second-round draw.  Each of the original big four is playing a virtual non-threat, as is David Ferrer.  Djokovic gets Benjamin Becker, Murray drew Leonardo Mayer, Federer gets Carlos Berlocq, and Nadal drew Rogerio Dutra Silva.

To find a second-round match with some interest, you have to look to sixth-seed Juan Martin del Potro, who drew Lleyton Hewitt.  Even eighth-seed Richard Gasquet gets off easy, drawing qualifier Stephane Robert.

Sure, Slam second rounds aren’t always filled with interest.  But there are plenty of unseeded players–like Hewitt, or even Lleyton’s victim yesterday, Brian Baker–who could make things interesting for a top seed.  Ivo Karlovic, Gael Monfils, and Marcos Baghdatis, frequently cited as floaters, will face lower-ranked seeds, while Bernard Tomic and Jack Sock have clear paths to the third round.

In other words, we can look forward to some more blowouts on the show courts.

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Could IBM’s contribution to the US Open get any worse?  It seems that the corporate giant has a team working hard on just that.

For those hardy enough to venture to the company’s website, there is a blog post called–I kid you not–“What if Watson Showed Up at the US Open Tennis Championships?”

(They’re not talking about Heather.)

The answer is predictable: A bunch of amazing stuff will happen, what with the leveraging and the analytics and undoubtedly some synergies.  And predictive.

Aaron believes that cognitive technologies could utterly transform the US Open, from the way the technology responds to changes in demand for computing resources to the experiences of the fans, commentators and players. “Watson could bring a whole new level of engagement. It’s a cognitive agent that can improve the interactions between all of the people involved and between them and the event itself,” he says.

Ooh, cognitive agent!

He envisions augmenting Watson with predictive analytics technologies the sports events  team  has created for the US Open. In this future scenario, that technology would help commentators analyze and offer insights about matches with a level of accuracy never possible before.

We can only hope that IBM’s Watson team is completely different from IBM’s current tennis group.

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On the subject of analytics–but I hope not embarrassingly bad ones–please check out my post last night with extremely detailed return profiles for Brian Baker and Lleyton Hewitt.  Return stats like you’ve never seen them before.