Curiosities – Heavy Topspin

Trivia Notebook #3: Indian Wells Upset Edition

Thanks to all who have suggested trivia topics — you’ve sent me some good ones. Keep them coming. Today I’ve got tidbits on three winners from Indian Wells: Belinda Bencic, Tallon Griekspoor, and Camila Osorio.

Better Belinda Bencic

Great dig from Oleg:

Those numbers include Bencic’s upset of Coco Gauff, but not her loss yesterday to Madison Keys. So the current top-five tally is 19-16, still comfortably better than her record against the next five, or the next ten after that.

The top five typically does not allow things like this. Since 1984, when my week-by-week ranking data begins, the WTA top five has won 79% of matches. That’s a healthy margin ahead of 69% for players ranked 6-10 and 64% for 11-20.

So, is Bencic alone? We’re looking for players with plenty of meetings against each of the three groups. She has 35 or more against each; let’s set the bar lower, at 20. I found 151 such players. Of those, we want to find those who have a better winning percentage against the top five than against the next five, and a better winning percentage against 6-10 than versus 11-20.

No dice. Belinda is the only one. 18 women managed a better record against the top five than the next five:

Player                    W% v1-5  W% v6-10  
Serena Williams             76.5%     62.7%  
Belinda Bencic              54.5%     48.6%  
Karolina Pliskova           46.0%     39.5%  
Jelena Ostapenko            44.8%     37.0%  
Maria Sakkari               41.2%     39.4%  
Kristina Mladenovic         40.9%     33.3%  
Daria Kasatkina             40.5%     24.2%  
Donna Vekic                 37.5%     20.0%  
Flavia Pennetta             37.2%     28.6%  
Marion Bartoli              30.2%     29.7%  
Samantha Stosur             29.0%     26.4%  
Elise Mertens               25.0%     19.0%  
Iva Majoli                  23.9%     22.6%  
Katarina Srebotnik          23.8%     20.0%  
Barbora Strycova            17.9%      9.7%  
Marianne Werdel Witmeyer    17.4%     13.0%  
Karina Habsudova            17.2%     11.1%  
Raffaella Reggi Concato     17.2%      5.9%

(All of these numbers, including Bencic’s, exclude Indian Wells.)

Comparing records against “next five” and “ten after that” is a bit odd in isolation, so instead, let’s compare top-ten and next-ten records. That’s an even more limited group:

Player               W% v1-10  W% v11-21  
Belinda Bencic          51.4%      35.0%  
Kiki Bertens            47.9%      38.2%  
Anett Kontaveit         40.4%      40.0%  
Kristina Mladenovic     37.0%      34.0%  
Donna Vekic             27.8%      26.8%  
Tsvetana Pironkova      25.0%      17.2%  
Katarina Srebotnik      21.7%      20.8%

Lots of these margins are close; Belinda’s is not. Maybe this explains the recent downward ranking moves of Elena Rybakina and Jasmine Paolini. They fear their colleague from Switzerland, so they’ve fled the top five so as to give her less motivation.

Tallon Griekspoor is no Bencic

Heading to the desert, Tallon Griekspoor held a 0-18 career record against the top five:

Some good fights in there, but a zero is a zero. That changed last Friday, when the Dutchman outlasted Alexander Zverev in a third-set tiebreak. Zverev has given several men a top-five victory in the last few weeks, but it still counts.

We have a few questions, then:

Is Griekspoor’s top-five losing streak the longest ever to start a career?
Is it the longest to be broken?
How does it compare to top-five losing streaks, including those that don’t start a career?

Losing your first 18 matches against top-fivers gets you into the conversation, but Griekspoor stopped five defeats short of the record. These numbers all go back to 1982, the first year for which I have week-by-week ATP rankings. Here’s the all-time list:

Player             Losses  Broken?  
Fabio Fognini          23      Yes  
Jeff Tarango           23       No  
Jarkko Nieminen        23      Yes  
Simone Bolelli         22      Yes  
Diego Schwartzman      22      Yes  
Francisco Clavet       21      Yes  
Potito Starace         20       No  
Tomas Carbonell        20      Yes  
Victor Hanescu         19       No  
Tallon Griekspoor      18      Yes  
Leonardo Mayer         18       No  
Ryan Harrison          18       No  
Alex De Minaur         18      Yes

It’s easy to dunk on Fabio Fognini, but in fairness, he came up at a very difficult time to score a top-five win. Check out the list of opponents for those 23 losses:

And yes, after all that, Fognini ended the string by beating Nadal. On clay. Twice.

I also need to mention Tomas Carbonell. He ended his 20-match losing streak with an upset of 5th-ranked Jonas Bjorkman … and that was it! He finished his career on at least one winning streak.

What about top-five losing streaks, not limited to those at the beginning of a career? Here are the longest runs of top-five futility, again going back to 1982:

Player                 Streak     
Andreas Seppi              32     
Viktor Troicki             28     
Philipp Kohlschreiber      27     
Jeff Tarango               23  *  
Fabio Fognini              23  *  
Jarkko Nieminen            23  *  
Jimmy Connors              23     
Eliot Teltscher            22     
Simone Bolelli             22  *  
Diego Schwartzman          22  *  
Andres Gomez               22     
Marin Cilic                22     
Gilles Muller              22     
Francisco Clavet           21  *

(Starred players are those from the previous list.)

Before we get to Seppi, Teltscher deserves an honorable mention here. His 22-loss streak started in early 1982, right after he upset John McEnroe at the season-ending Masters event. Had he lost that match, the string would have extended to 34, since the McEnroe upset broke a separate 11-loss streak.

Seppi’s long run of frustration would have been hard to predict: He had beaten Lleyton Hewitt and Nadal before he broke into the top 40 himself. But the 2008 victory over Rafa would be his last top-five win for nearly seven years:

As with Fognini, not an easy time to knock out anybody in the top five.

Finally, did you notice Jimmy Connors on the list? He is by far the greatest player to suffer such a long losing streak, and it was all the more notable because it began when he was a top-two player himself. He was responsible for 15 of Teltscher’s losses, but by 1985, things turned south for Jimbo:

Connors was 32 years old when the streak began, so it didn’t entirely come out of the blue. Still, that’s a tough run for a top-ten player.

Defeats of former number ones

Camila Osorio opened her Indian Wells campaign with a straight-set win over Naomi Osaka. It wasn’t exactly a shock, as Osorio is ranked slightly above Osaka. But here’s a different spin on it:

Is this something we’re doing now? I mean, great for Camila and Colombia–I’m always happy to see a tennis non-powerhouse getting attention. But “former number one” spans a fair few players, some of whom have stuck around long after they fell from the top of the list. Victoria Azarenka alone has lost over 100 matches since she first dropped out of the top ten in 2014.

Still, what the hell, let’s play.

Going back to 1984, there have been 27 WTA number ones. I’m going to count wins against the current number one as well–presumably those are at least as noteworthy as beating a former top player. Since the beginning of my week-by-week ranking data, current or former number ones have lost 2,587 matches.

Here are the stars who have handed out the largest number of noteworthy(?) victories. Unlike some loss leaderboards, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Azarenka is a good example: Inclusion here says more about longevity than anything else. So, losses after first reaching the number one ranking:

Player                   Losses  
Venus Williams              219  
Jelena Jankovic             205  
Caroline Wozniacki          192  
Arantxa Sanchez Vicario     168  
Ana Ivanovic                162  
Victoria Azarenka           142  
Karolina Pliskova           131  
Maria Sharapova             130  
Serena Williams             116  
Angelique Kerber            114

Osorio represented Osaka’s 49th such loss. Venus Williams has allowed 108 different women to put “beat a former number one” on their CV, and Osaka is already up to 33.

All told, 369 women have now beaten a current or former number one in the last four decades. They represent 52 different countries, now including Colombia.

It really isn’t that elite of a group. Osorio has better achievements to brag about, including–to bring us full circle–a top-five win, one that took her far fewer than 18 tries to accomplish.

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The Riddle of the Ruud-Rublev Reversal

The story of the the 2024 ATP Tour Finals was the dominance of Jannik Sinner. I’ll refer you to what I wrote after the Australian Open: Yes, Jannik Sinner Really Is This Good. He just passed the 2,300 Elo threshold, becoming only the 12th man since Rod Laver to do so. When I update the Tennis 128 in a few weeks, he’ll be on it.

For all that, I’m preoccupied with something else. On the final day of round robin play, Casper Ruud beat Andrey Rublev to secure a place in the semi-finals. It was their eighth meeting and the Norwegian’s third victory:

Notice anything odd? Take away the unfinished Australian Open tilt, and the head-to-head breaks down precisely on surface lines. Rublev has won all four encounters on clay, while Ruud has run the table on hard courts. Not just any hard courts: indoors, at the Tour Finals.

We can look to external factors to explain some of the individual results. Casper had more at stake on Friday than the Russian did, with a chance to qualify for the final four. Rublev is older and broke through correspondingly earlier, so he was the natural favorite in their early meetings. Injuries and illness may have influenced another outcome or two, even aside from the retirement in Melbourne.

Still: 0-3 in completed matches for the ball-basher on hard courts, and 0-4 for the Roland Garros finalist on clay. Something’s going on here.

Not so fast

Rublev, to be fair, is hardly a fast-court specialist. His first tour-level title came on dirt in Umag, and he picked up a Masters crown last year in Monte Carlo, on one of the circuit’s slowest surfaces. The Russian’s forehand is a weapon in any conditions, and slow courts can disguise some of his weaknesses.

On the other hand, however much Rublev likes the dirt, Ruud likes it more. Earlier this year, I quantified the notion of “surface sensitivity,” the degree to which a player’s results are influenced by court speed. Rublev scored at -2.2, indicating that he does better on slower surfaces, a bit more so than the typical tour regular. Casper was considerably further down the list, at -5.0. The rating tells us that he’s more receptive to slow courts than Pablo Carreno Busta or Jaume Munar. He’s grades about the same as Diego Schwartzman.

Maybe the oddball head-to-head is a quirk of when the pair have met? Not all hard courts play fast, and not all clay behaves like the crushed brick at Roland Garros. Here are the venues for the seven completed meetings, along with my ace-based surface speed rating for each. Ratings above 1 are faster than average, below 1 are slower:

Year  Tournament   Winner  Speed  
2024  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.36  
2023  Bastad       Rublev   0.86  
2022  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.50  
2021  Tour Finals  Ruud     1.51  
2021  Monte Carlo  Rublev   0.54  
2020  Hamburg      Rublev   0.52  
2019  Hamburg      Rublev   0.74

Hypothesis denied! The 2021 and 2022 Tour Finals were the fastest conditions of their respective years, while Monte Carlo was the slowest of the entire 2021 season. Last year’s Bastad surface was fairly neutral for a clay court, but the rest of the Ruud-Rublev showdowns took place on fast hard courts or slow clay.

We could always mark down a string of seven surface-confounding results to luck, especially when both players are capable in all conditions. But it would be far more satisfying to find an explanation that tells us something about the players and their particular skills.

Stoppable

We don’t have to look far. Here are Casper’s win rates on first and second serve points against Rublev, separated by surface:

Surface  1st W%  2nd W%  
Clay      56.8%   48.4%  
Hard      72.7%   50.7%

Everybody wins fewer first serve points on clay than on hard courts, but not like this. The average gap for top-50 players in 2024 is four percentage points–not sixteen. At tour level against the entire field, Ruud has shown an even smaller difference, winning 73.1% of hard-court first-serve points against 71.2% of those on clay.

Rublev is not a brilliant returner. He’s a serviceable one with tactics to match. He often struggles to get first serves back in play. On second serve, he’s unafraid to unleash his weapons, accepting some errors in exchange for tilting other points in his favor. On clay, he’s able to turn a few more first serves into rally openers. In 2024, his gap between clay and hard-court first-serve return points won was bigger than average. But not nearly as wide as it is against Casper.

When it works…

Ruud, like many men who have developed into strong clay-courters, doesn’t have a monster serve. He can place it, he can disguise it, and he knows how to play behind it. On a fast hard court, those skills–combined with a bit more risk-taking–can result in numbers that look more like those of a big server. Against Rublev last week, he won just shy of 80% of his serve points, supported by 15 aces.

When the Norwegian is hitting corners and the ball is skimming off a court like the speedy one in Turin, Rublev is helpless. Over his career, according to the nearly 200 matches logged by the Match Charting Project, he puts 58% of first serves back in play. Against Casper on Friday, he didn’t manage 50%–a repeat of his performance on the same court two years earlier.

Rublev’s first-serve-return struggles on hard court contrast with how he feasts on Ruud’s serve on clay. The next table shows the rate at which the Russian puts Casper’s first serves in play, as well as his win percentage when he does so:

Match                Result  1st: RiP%  RiP W%  
2024 Tour Finals RR       L      46.9%   43.3%  
2023 Bastad F             W      64.6%   61.3%  
2022 Tour Finals SF       L      45.7%   50.0%  
2021 Tour Finals RR       L      67.5%   51.9%  
2021 Monte Carlo SF       W      84.4%   59.3%  
2020 Hamburg SF           W      91.4%   59.4%

The exception to the rule here is the 2021 Tour Finals match, which ended in a third-set tiebreak. It was the closest either man has come to securing one of the matches he “should” have won. Rublev won 52.9% of total points, but Ruud served his way out of just enough jams to come through.

On the very slow Monte Carlo and Hamburg courts, Rublev’s ability to handle the Norwegian’s first serve meant that Ruud was left with no edge whatsoever. Casper might be the superior baseliner, but he started too many points at a disadvantage. The picture might look different if they played on slow clay today, since Ruud is stronger and tactically savvier on serve. But I imagine it would still be a struggle, one in which few of Casper’s service games would sail by quickly.

Pundits like to say that tennis is a game of matchups. They often overstate their case: The better player (by ranking, or Elo rating, or whatever) usually wins. When they don’t, it isn’t always because of some quirk in the head-to-head. With Rublev and Ruud, though, such a quirk dictates the results. Few men are able to erase Rublev’s advantage on a hard court as much as the Norwegian can. Casper’s first serve is rarely so ineffectual as when the Russian is waiting for it on dirt. Ruud is set for another big European clay swing next year–so long as his buddy Andrey lands in the other half of the draw.

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Trivia: Deja Vu All Over Again

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the last several days, Fernando Verdasco has seen a little too much of Diego Schwartzman. On Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, the two players met in the final of the 500-level clay court event, which Schwartzman won in straight sets. Both players immediately headed for the hard court tournament in Acapulco, where they drew each other in the first round. Verdasco lost again, this time winning six games instead of five.

The odds of this sort of final-to-first-round scenario, with back-to-back matches against the same opponent, is quite rare, and the surface switch makes this one even more unlikely. For one thing, the tour doesn’t move from one court type to another very frequently, and when they do, players don’t always travel through the same sequence of events. Another cause of improbability is that a pair of players who contest a final are usually pretty good, meaning that both of them are often seeded at their next event, making a first-round meeting impossible. In order to see a pair of consecutive matches like Schwartzman’s and Verdasco’s, we require synchronized schedules and a hefty helping of luck.

As Carl Bialik pointed out, this isn’t the first time Verdasco has played back-to-back matches in February against the same opponent, albeit on the same surface: He did so in 2011, dropping the San Jose final and then a Memphis first-rounder to Milos Raonic. Remarkably, when we broaden the search a bit, Verdasco’s name comes up twice more. In 2009, he lost to Radek Stepanek in the Brisbane final, then in his next event, the Australian Open, he beat Stepanek in the third round. (Radek played Sydney in the meantime, for what it’s worth.) And five years later, Verdasco overcame Nicolas Almagro to win the 2014 Houston title, then faced his countryman in his next event two weeks later, losing to Almagro in the round of 16. (Again, while they were back-to-back tourneys for Verdasco, Nico squeezed in a few matches in Monte Carlo in between.)

Back to the matter at hand: In the course of five decades of Open Era men’s tennis, just about everything has happened at least once before. But this exact scenario–two guys facing each other in a final, then a first round match the very next week on a different surface–is a new one. Relax any one of those constraints, and we see a few instances in the past.

Since 1970, there have been about 3,750 tour-level finals. Roughly one-third of the time, the two finalists ended up playing each other at least once more over the course of the season. 197 of those pairs drew each other in their very next event, and in another 62 of the finals, one of the players faced the other in his next tournament (though the other had played an event or two in the meantime, like Almagro and Stepanek). Several of the 197 duos played each other the next week, though it is a bit more common that there was a week off in between.

Of the 197 finalist pairs, 25 of them drew each other in the round of 32 or earlier in their following tournament, though not all of those were first-round matches. (Or, in the case of Andy Murray and Philipp Kohlschreiber in 2015 after contesting the Munich final, they played in Murray’s first Madrid match the following week but not Kohlschreiber’s, since Murray had a bye.) The most common round in which finalists met again was another final, which ensued about one-third of the time.

Dividing up the 197 pairs a different way, about one-fifth (39) played the follow-up match on a different surface. In only a few of these instances were the two surfaces hard and clay; a disproportionate number of these back-to-back matches happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, when carpet was regular feature on tour, so the hard-to-carpet or carpet-to-hard transition shows up in these results much more frequently than hard-to-clay or clay-to-hard. For any pair of surfaces in these 39 matches, only three occured in the round of 32, and none in the round of 64 or 128.

The three precedents for Schwartzman’s back-to-back wins all have several things in common. First, like Diego’s feat, the same player won both matches. The other two are unlike the Schwartzman double: In each case, there was a one-week break between the tournaments and one of the events was played on carpet.

The first similar achievement was recorded by Tom Gorman, who won consecutive matches against Bob Carmichael in 1976. The first was the Sacramento final (on carpet), followed by the first round in Las Vegas (on hard). Next up was Martin Jaite‘s pair of wins over Javier Sanchez in 1989. After triumphing in the Sao Paulo final (on carpet), Jaite won a hard-court first-rounder against the same opponent two weeks later. Finally, Fernando Gonzalez defeated Jose Acususo twice in a row in 2002, first in the clay-court final in Palermo, then a bit more than a week later on carpet in the first round in Lyon.

Like Schwartzman and his three closest predecessors, most of the finalists managed to defend their victory. Of the different-surface instances, the same player won both matches 26 of 39 times. When the two matches took place on the same surface, the title winner won the next match 101 of 158 times. Most recently, Yuichi Sugita failed to do so: After beating Adrian Mannarino for his first tour-level title in Antalya last summer, he met the Frenchman again in the Wimbledon second round and lost. In a more notable exception, Andre Agassi knocked out Petr Korda for the 1991 Washington title, then lost to Korda in his first match the next week in Montreal. (It wasn’t Korda’s first match, as he didn’t get a bye like Agassi did, but the extra effort paid off. The Czech reached the final.)

We could wait fifty years for an exact parallel of Schwartzman’s feat. Or we could set the bar a little lower and see a rematch almost immediately: Another of last week’s finalist pairs, Lucas Pouille and Karen Khachanov, followed up their Marseille title match with another meeting in the Dubai second round only three days later. Regardless of which standard you choose, there’s one person who would surely prefer to take a break from consecutive matches against the same opponent, and that’s Fernando Verdasco.