Category: Doubles

Angelique Kerber wasn’t the only top seed to crash out early at this year’s French Open. In the men’s doubles draw, the top section opened up when Henri Kontinen and John Peers, the world’s top-ranked team, lost to the Spanish pair of David Marrero and Tommy Robredo. It’s plausible to attribute the upset to the clay, as Kontinen-Peers have tallied a pedestrian five wins against four losses on the dirt this season and one could guess that the Spaniards are at their strongest on clay.

Fortunately we don’t have to guess. Using a doubles variant of sElo–surface-specific Elo, which I began writing about a few days ago in the context of women’s singles–we can make rough estimates of how Kontinen/Peers would fare against Marrero/Robredo on each surface. The top seeds are solid on all surfaces–less than a year ago, they won a clay title in Hamburg–but stronger on hard courts. sElo ranks them 4th and 8th on hard, but 10th and 13th on clay among tour regulars.  Marrero is the surface-specialist of the bunch, ranking 37th on clay and 78th on hard. Robredo throws a wrench into the exercise, as he has played very little doubles recently, only eight events since the beginning of 2016.

Using these numbers–including those derived from Robredo’s limited sample–we find that sElo would have given Kontinen/Peers a 73.6% chance of winning yesterday, compared to a 78.3% advantage on a hard court. Even if we adjust Robredo’s clay-court sElo to something closer to his all-surface rating, the top seeds still look like 69% favorites.

A more striking example comes from yesterday’s other big upset, in which Julio Peralta and Horacio Zeballos took out Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez. On any surface, the Lopezes are the superior team, but Peralta and Zeballos have a much larger surface differential:

Player    Hard sElo  Clay sElo  
M Lopez        1720       1804  
F Lopez        1713       1772  
Zeballos       1651       1756  
Peralta        1517       1770

On a hard court, sElo gives the Lopezes a 68.1% chance of winning this matchup. But on clay, the gap narrows all the way to 53.6%. It’s still a bit of an upset for the South Americans, but not one that should come as much of a surprise.

Mismatches

I’ve speculated in the past that surface preferences aren’t as pronounced in doubles as they are in singles. Regardless of surface, points are shorter, and many teams position one player at the net even on the dirt. While some hard-courters are probably uncomfortable on clay (and vice versa), I wouldn’t expect the effects to be as substantial as they are in singles.

The numbers tell a different story. Here are the top ten, ranked by hard court sElo:

Rank  Player          Hard sElo  
1     Jack Sock            1947  
2     Nicolas Mahut        1893  
3     Marcelo Melo         1883  
4     Henri Kontinen       1879  
5     P-H Herbert          1862  
6     Bob Bryan            1851  
7     Mike Bryan           1846  
8     John Peers           1842  
9     Bruno Soares         1829  
10    Jamie Murray         1828

By clay court sElo:

Rank  Player                Clay sElo  
1     Mike Bryan                 1950  
2     Bob Bryan                  1950  
3     P-H Herbert                1894  
4     Nicolas Mahut              1889  
5     Jack Sock                  1887  
6     Robert Farah               1850  
7     Juan Sebastian Cabal       1849  
8     Pablo Cuevas               1824  
9     Rohan Bopanna              1812  
10    John Peers                 1810

Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares, who appear in the hard court top ten, sit outside the top 25 in clay court sElo. Robert Farah and Juan Sebastian Cabal are 41st and 42nd in hard court sElo, despite ranking in the clay court top seven. Pablo Cuevas, another clay court top-tenner, is 87th on the hard court list.

To go beyond these anecdotes–noteworthy as they are–we need to compare the level of surface preference in men’s doubles to other tours. To do that, I calculated the correlation coefficent between hard court and clay court sElo for the top 50 players (ranked by overall Elo) in men’s doubles, men’s singles, and women’s singles. (I don’t yet have an adequate database to generate ratings for women’s doubles.)

In other words, we’re testing how much a player’s results on one surface predict his or her results on the other major surface. The higher the correlation coefficient, the more likely it is that a player will have similar results on hard and clay. Here’s how the tours compare:

Tour             Correl  
Men's Singles     0.708  
Women's Singles   0.417  
Men's Doubles     0.323

In contrast to my hypothesis above, surface preferences in men’s doubles appear to be much stronger than in either men’s or women’s singles. (And there’s a huge difference between men’s and women’s singles, but that’s a subject for another day.)

Randomness

I suspect that the low correlation of surface-specific Elos in men’s doubles is partly due to the more random nature of doubles results. Because the event is more serve-dominated, there are more close sets ending in tiebreaks, and because of the no-ad, super-tiebreak format used outside of Slams, tight matches are decided by a smaller number of points. Thus, every doubles player’s results–and their various Elo ratings–reflect the influence of chance more than the singles results are.

Another consideration–one that I haven’t yet made sense of–is that surface-specific ratings don’t improve doubles forecasts they way that they do men’s and women’s singles predictions. As I wrote on Sunday, sElo represents a big improvement over surface-neutral Elo for women’s forecasts, and in an upcoming post, I’ll be able to make some similar observations for the men’s game. Using Brier score, a measure of the calibration of predictions, we can see the effect of using surface-specific Elo ratings in 2016 tour-level matches:

Tour             Elo Brier  sElo Brier  
Men's Singles        0.202       0.169  
Women's Singles      0.220       0.179  
Men's Doubles        0.171       0.181

The lower the Brier score, the more accurate the forecasts. This isn’t a fluke of 2016: The differences in men’s doubles Brier scores are around 0.01 for each of the last 15 seasons. By this measure, Elo does a very good job predicting the outcome of men’s doubles matches, but the surface-specific sElo represents a small step back. It could be that the smaller sample–using only one surface’s worth of results–is more damaging to forecasts in doubles than it is in singles.

Doubles analytics is particularly uncharted territory, and there’s plenty of work remaining for researchers even in this narrow subtopic. There’s lots of work to do for the world’s top doubles players as well, now that we can point to a noticeably weaker surface for so many of them.