Category: Records

Danielle Collins and Surprise Major Semi-finalists

Italian translation at settesei.it

With a three-set win today over Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Danielle Collins became the first woman into the 2019 Australian Open semi-finals. She was already the biggest surprise of the eight quarter-finalists. A week ago, most pundits (myself included) would’ve picked dozens of players more likely to find themselves in the final four.

Collins, a 25-year-old American, has doubled her grand slam match experience at a single tournament. She first made a name for herself as a stellar collegiate player, winning national titles in 2014 and 2016, which earned her wild cards into her first two majors. While she gave Simona Halep a scare by taking a set in their 2014 US Open encounter, no wins resulted from either of the wild cards. After her run to the Miami semi-finals last year, she earned her way into three more slams, but she drew seeds at all three and had to settle for first-round loser’s checks. All told, Collins’s experience at majors amounted to five main draws, five first-round losses, and a couple of wins in qualifying.

There’s simply no precedent for what she has done in Melbourne. She opened by narrowly upsetting 14th seed Julia Goerges, then won six sets in a row to knock out Sachia Vickery, 19th seed Caroline Garcia, and 2nd seed Angelique Kerber, needing barely one hour per match. Today’s contest took a bit longer, but the end result was the same: a 2-6 7-5 6-1 victory over Pavlyuchenkova, who was playing in her fifth major quarter-final.

A berth in a major semi-final with no previous grand slam match wins: that’s something worth a database query. Since 1980, only three other women have done the same: Monica Seles at the 1989 French Open, Jennifer Capriati at the 1990 French, and Alexandra Stevenson in 1999 at Wimbledon. Collins doesn’t exactly fit in with that trio: Seles and Capriati were playing their first majors, and neither had reached their 16th birthdays. Stevenson was 18 years old, playing only her third slam main draw. The closest comp for Collins is found in the men’s game, where 25-year-old Marco Cecchinato reached the semis at Roland Garros last year despite recording no wins in his previous attempts at majors.

Reaching the final four in one’s sixth slam isn’t as rare. 12 different women have done so, including Seles, Capriati, and Stevenson, along with Venus Williams and Eugenie Bouchard. But again, Collins’s time at the University of Virginia sets her apart from this group: all but one were teenagers, and the only other exception, Clarisa Fernandez, was 20 years old when she reached the 2002 Roland Garros semi-final. The least experienced 25-year-old semi-finalist was Fabiola Zuluaga, who made it to the 2004 Australian Open semis in her 17th major, with 22 match wins in her first 16 tries.

History offers few precedents for Collins. While male collegiates such as Kevin Anderson and John Isner have established themselves in the top ten and gone deep at majors, the women’s game has always skewed younger. Yes, the days of 15-year-old sensations like Capriati and Seles are behind us, but the most recent major title went to 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, and the same year that Collins won her first national title for Virginia, Bouchard–who is two months younger than the American–reached the Wimbledon final. The greatest success story in women’s collegiate tennis belongs to Lisa Raymond, who is best known for her exploits on the doubles court.

Perhaps Collins’s success will change that, much as Anderson–whose first major semi-final came at age 31, in his 34th slam–has shown that college can fit in the plans of a would-be ATP star. With 20% of the WTA top 100 in their thirties, there’s more for a late starter to look forward to than ever before. It’s unreasonable to expect that Collins will be a regular feature at the tail end of grand slams, but it’s possible she’ll outdo Raymond, who peaked at 15th in the singles rankings. Next time we see her in the second week of a major, we won’t be so surprised.

The Big Four and Grand Slam Title Blocks

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Edoardo Salvati

In the last fifteen years, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray—the Big Four—have dominated the ATP tour like no one before them. It’s hard to find a better example of oligarchy outside of geopolitics.

Since Wimbledon 2003, Federer’s first Grand Slam title, they have amassed 54 of 62 majors (or 87%) and been involved in another four finals. Similarly, since Federer’s first Masters win at Hamburg in 2002, they have won 106 of 159 titles at that level (or 66%) and contested 12 more finals. Since 2003 they have won 12 of 16 ATP Finals (or 75%) and contested one of the other four finals. 2017 and 2018 was the first time that outsiders won back-to-back season-ending titles in fifteen years.

It is an unprecedented level of domination that has left little glory for other players. But who are these others and how much would have they won had they been able to overcome the Big Four? At the Match Charting Project, we like to collect data (and you’re always welcome to contribute). Recently, we started working on a subset of matches that comprises all the Slam semi-finals back to 1980. Plenty of those featured recurring names from this second tier, so I was intrigued to see which players would have benefitted most in a world where the Big Four were not as good.

Deep inside of a parallel universe

Starting from Wimbledon 2003, I considered a hard-to-imagine scenario: What if the Big Four never won a major semi-final or final? For instance, when Grigor Dimitrov reached the final four at the 2017 Australian Open, he would have beaten Nadal (instead of losing in five sets), and then defeated Federer to win the title. When Juan Martin del Potro played Nadal in the 2018 French Open semi-final (he lost in straight sets), we rewrite history to make Delpo the winner, going on to face Dominic Thiem in the final. At the same event, in our parallel universe, Thiem wins the final against Nadal (he really lost in straight sets) and becomes the French Open champion for a second theoretical time.

The resulting slam tallies aren’t a precise redistribution of some of the Slams won by the Big Four, because there can be two different parallel-universe winners for the same tournament. Nevertheless, the title and final counts provide a general idea of who would’ve thrived in a Big Four-less sport. The following table lists the additional titles and finals (to a player’s actual wins, not shown) belonging to a parallel universe of tennis. 

Player                 Extra Slams              Extra Finals      
Stan Wawrinka          6 (2 AO - 2 FO - 2 US)   0                 
David Ferrer           6 (2 AO - 2 FO - 2 US)   0                 
Andy Roddick           5 (1 AO - 3 WIM - 1 US)  2 (1AO - 1 WIM)   
Jo Wilfried Tsonga     4 (2 AO - 2 WIM)         0                 
Tomas Berdych          3 (1 AO - 1 FO - 1 US)   2 (WIM)           
Richard Gasquet        3 (2 WIM - 2 US)         0                 
Milos Raonic           3 (1 AO - 2 WIM)         0                 
Juan Martin del Potro  2 (1 WIM - 1 US)         3 (2 FO - 1 US)   
Marin Cilic            2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         2 (1 AO - 1 US)   
Nicolay Davydenko      2 (1 FO - 1 US)          1 (US)            
Dominic Thiem          2 (FO)                   1 (FO)            
Marat Safin            2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Marcos Baghdatis       2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Robin Soderling        2 (FO)                   0                 
Kevin Anderson         2 (1 WIM - 1 US)         0                 
Grigor Dimitrov        2 (1 AO - 1 WIM)         0                 
Lleyton Hewitt         1 (US)                   2 (1 WIM - 1 US)  
Gael Monfils           1 (FO)                   1 (US)                       
Mark Philippoussis     1 (WIM)                  0                 
Andre Agassi           1 (US)                   0                 
Fernando Gonzalez      1 (AO)                   0                 
Jonas Bjorkman         1 (WIM)                  0                 
Mariano Puerta         1 (FO)                   0                 
Ivan Ljubicic          1 (FO)                   0                 
Rainer Schuettler      1 (WIM)                  0                 
Fernando Verdasco      1 (AO)                   0                 
Mikhail Youznhy        1 (US)                   0                 
Ernests Gulbis         1 (FO)                   0                 
Jerzy Janowicz         1 (WIM)                  0  
Kei Nishikori          0                        1 (US)                
Juan Carlos Ferrero    0                        1 (AO)            
Sebastian Grosjean     0                        1 (WIM)           
Tim Henman             0                        1 (US)            
Nicolas Kiefer         0                        1 (AO)            
David Nalbandian       0                        1 (FO)            
Tommy Haas             0                        1 (WIM)           
Hyeon Chung            0                        1 (AO)            
Jurgen Melzer          0                        1 (FO)            
Total                  62                       23

It’s no surprise to see Stan Wawrinka, a three-time winner and nine-time major semi-finalist, at the top. He would triple his overall count for each Slam he won, though Wimbledon would remain elusive. Had he beaten Federer in the quarter-final in 2014, he would have gotten as far as the semi-final against Milos Raonic.

There’s a group of players whose careers would look even more outstanding. David Ferrer, Jo Wilfried Tsonga, Tomas Berdych, Richard Gasquet and Raonic could all claim to be Slam winners. Ferrer lost all his semi-finals and a final to the Big Four, and winning a Slam would have been a fitting reward for his many years of elite-level performance.

And, of course, there’s Andy Roddick, who must have wished that the only illustrious citizen from Basel was Jacob Bernoulli. After winning the US Open in 2003, Roddick lost all the finals he played to Federer, including three Wimbledon Championships. 

One player who may deserve to be even higher on the list is del Potro, who had to face a member of the Big Four in every semi-final he played and never went beyond the quarter-finals at the Australian Open, twice knocked out by Federer. You would expect del Potro to have won more than two of these hypothetical majors.

The gatekeeper

A few years ago, in an article for FiveThirtyEight, Carl Bialik investigated the assumption that Nadal led all the Open-era greats as the biggest obstacle to Grand Slam titles. Inventing a stat called the “title block,” he quantified every loss to Nadal with a fraction of the title depending on the round: half a title block for a loss to Nadal in the finals, a quarter for the semi-finals, and so on. 

Let’s use that stat and extend the analysis to see how many titles, since Wimbledon 2003, the Big Four cost the other players, as shown in the following table. Walkovers and retirements were included. 

Blocked                  AO    RG   WIM   USO  Titles Cost  
Roger Federer          2.00  2.50  1.50  1.00         7.00  
Andy Murray            2.94  1.25  1.38  0.88         6.44  
Novak Djokovic         0.06  2.13  1.00  2.50         5.69  
Rafael Nadal           1.13  0.13  1.75  0.75         3.75  
Andy Roddick           0.50  0.00  1.78  0.88         3.16  
Tomas Berdych          1.03  0.19  1.31  0.25         2.78  
David Ferrer           0.88  1.13  0.13  0.51         2.63  
Stanislas Wawrinka     0.72  1.00  0.19  0.63         2.53  
Juan Martin Del Potro  0.25  0.70  0.45  1.03         2.43  
Marin Cilic            0.81  0.09  0.94  0.44         2.28  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga     0.94  0.19  0.81  0.34         2.28  
Lleyton Hewitt         0.25  0.19  0.56  0.78         1.78  
Milos Raonic           0.56  0.13  0.88  0.06         1.63  
Robin Soderling        0.00  1.13  0.23  0.25         1.62  
Richard Gasquet        0.03  0.38  0.63  0.41         1.46  
Gael Monfils           0.11  0.75  0.00  0.57         1.43  
Kevin Anderson         0.07  0.00  0.64  0.50         1.21  
Dominic Thiem          0.00  1.02  0.00  0.13         1.14  
Marcos Baghdatis       0.64  0.03  0.44  0.02         1.13  
Nikolay Davydenko      0.27  0.25  0.01  0.53         1.05  
Fernando Gonzalez      0.56  0.17  0.13  0.16         1.02  
Fernando Verdasco      0.30  0.25  0.13  0.28         0.96  
Kei Nishikori          0.38  0.20  0.13  0.25         0.96  
Mikhail Youzhny        0.05  0.06  0.41  0.42         0.95  
Grigor Dimitrov        0.47  0.03  0.31  0.06         0.88  
Marat Safin            0.53  0.00  0.28  0.00         0.81  
Andre Agassi           0.13  0.00  0.03  0.63         0.78  
Tommy Haas             0.11  0.22  0.41  0.00         0.73  
Tommy Robredo          0.19  0.13  0.11  0.25         0.67  
Feliciano Lopez        0.11  0.01  0.19  0.34         0.65  
Gilles Simon           0.30  0.06  0.19  0.03         0.58  
Juan Carlos Ferrero    0.25  0.00  0.32  0.00         0.57  
David Nalbandian       0.13  0.25  0.03  0.16         0.56  
Jurgen Melzer          0.10  0.25  0.06  0.09         0.51  
Mark Philippoussis     0.00  0.00  0.50  0.01         0.51  
Mariano Puerta         0.00  0.50  0.00  0.00         0.50  
Nicolas Almagro        0.06  0.41  0.00  0.03         0.50

As expected, the Big Four have blocked each other more than they have any other player, costing themselves a whopping 22.88 majors, with Federer and Murray paying the highest price, 7.00 and 6.44 respectively. Other familiar names are just below the top four. There are 17 players who were blocked from at least one major title.

Nadal retains his status as the Slam gatekeeper: you have to pass through him to win a major. Not only did the rest of the Big Four fails to block him as much as he did them–he has the lowest major titles cost among the Big Four at 3.75–but he also has blocked the rest of the quartet more than any other player.     

Blocker         Blocked         Titles cost  
Rafael Nadal    Roger Federer          3.75  
Rafael Nadal    Novak Djokovic         3.13  
Rafael Nadal    Andy Murray            1.44  
Total                                  8.32  
                                             
Novak Djokovic  Andy Murray            3.13  
Novak Djokovic  Roger Federer          3.00  
Novak Djokovic  Rafael Nadal           1.88  
Total                                  8.01  
                                             
Roger Federer   Andy Murray            1.88  
Roger Federer   Novak Djokovic         1.56  
Roger Federer   Rafael Nadal           1.50  
Total                                  4.94  
                                             
Andy Murray     Novak Djokovic         1.00  
Andy Murray     Rafael Nadal           0.38  
Andy Murray     Roger Federer          0.25  
Total                                  1.63

Nadal boasts a net credit of 2.25 major titles versus Federer, of 1.25 against Djokovic and of 1.06 compared to Murray. Just as the rest of the men’s tour would prefer that the Big Four had pursued a different sport, three-quarters of the Big Four have had plenty of reasons to wish that Rafa had shifted his focus to golf.

At this month’s Australian Open, Nadal continues to loom large. With the No. 2 seed, he is a potential semi-final opponent for Federer or Murray and, of course, a possible foe in the final for top seed Djokovic. There’s no guarantee that Nadal will stand in anyone’s way, but with these men accounting for the top three seeds at yet another major, the era of Big Four title blocks is far from over.

—

Edoardo Salvati is on a mission to raise the level of the Italian sports conversation. He founded settesei.it and has written about tennis and other sports for publications such as Contrasti, Undici, Il Tennis Italiano. He is a prolific and proud contributor to the Match Charting Project.

Ivo Karlovic and the Odds-On Tiebreak

Italian translation at settesei.it

Ivo Karlovic is on track to accomplish something that no player has ever done before. Over the course of his career, Karlovic, along with John Isner, has set a new standard for one-dimensional tennis playing. The big men win so many service points that they are almost impossible to break, making their own service-return limitations manageable. With a player on court who maximizes the likelihood of service holds, tiebreaks seem inevitable.

This season, Karlovic has taken tiebreak-playing to a new level. Through last night’s semi-final at the Calgary Challenger (final score: 7-6, 7-6), the 6-11 Croatian has played 42 matches, including 115 sets and 61 tiebreaks. In percentage terms, that’s a tiebreak in 53% of all sets. Among player-seasons with at least 30 matches across the ATP, ATP qualifying, and ATP Challenger levels since 1990, no one has ever before topped 50%.

Even approaching the 50% threshold marks someone as very unusual. Less than 20% of tour-level sets reach 6-6, and it’s rare for any single player to top 30%. This year, only Isner and Nick Kyrgios have joined Karlovic in the 30%-plus club. Even Reilly Opelka, the seven-foot American prospect, has tallied only 31 tiebreaks in 109 sets this season, good for a more modest rate of 28.4%.

Karlovic is in truly uncharted territory. Isner came very close in his breakthrough 2007 season on the Challenger tour, playing 51 tiebreaks in 102 sets. The rest of the all-time top ten list starts to get a little repetitive:

Rank  Year  Player        Sets  TBs    TB%  
1     2018  Ivo Karlovic   115   61  53.0%  
2     2007  John Isner     102   51  50.0%  
3     2005  Ivo Karlovic   118   56  47.5%  
4     2016  Ivo Karlovic   146   68  46.6%  
5     2017  Ivo Karlovic    91   42  46.2%  
6     2006  Ivo Karlovic   106   48  45.3%  
7     2015  Ivo Karlovic   168   76  45.2%  
8     2018  John Isner     149   65  43.6%  
9     2001  Ivo Karlovic    78   34  43.6%  
10    2004  Ivo Karlovic   140   61  43.6%

* Karlovic’s and Isner’s 2018 totals are through matches of October 20th. 

For more variety, here are the 15 different players with the highest single-season tiebreak rates:

Rank  Year  Player           Sets  TBs    TB%  
1     2018  Ivo Karlovic      115   61  53.0%  
2     2007  John Isner        102   51  50.0%  
3     2004  Amer Delic         95   37  38.9%  
4     2008  Michael Llodra    117   45  38.5%  
5     2008  Chris Guccione    173   65  37.6%  
6     2002  Alexander Waske   109   40  36.7%  
7     1993  Greg Rusedski      99   35  35.4%  
8     2017  Reilly Opelka     115   40  34.8%  
9     2005  Wayne Arthurs      95   33  34.7%  
10    2004  Dick Norman        97   33  34.0%  
11    2001  Ivan Ljubicic     148   50  33.8%  
12    2004  Max Mirnyi        137   46  33.6%  
13    2014  Samuel Groth      172   57  33.1%  
14    2005  Gregory Carraz     98   32  32.7%  
15    2007  Fritz Wolmarans    80   26  32.5%

Karlovic is truly in a class by himself. He’ll turn 40 next February, but age has had little impact on the effectiveness of his serve. While he reached his career peak ranking of No. 14 back in 2008, it was more recently that his serve was at its best. In 2015, he won more than three-quarters of his service points and held 95.5% of his serve games. Both of those marks were career highs. His recent serve stats have remained among his career bests, winning 73.5% of service points in 2018, though as his ranking has tumbled, these feats have come against weaker competition, in ATP qualifying and Challenger matches.

Age has taken its toll, however, and Ivo’s return game is the victim. From 2008-12, he broke serve in more than one out of ten chances, while in 2016-18, it has fallen below 8%. Neither mark is particularly impressive–Isner and Kyrgios are the only tour regulars to break in less than 17% of games this season–but the difference, from a peak of 12.0% in 2011 to a low of 7.1% this year, helps explain why the Croatian is playing more tiebreaks than ever.

Karlovic has long been one of the most unique players on tour, thanks to his height, his extreme statistical profile, and his willingness (or maybe his need) to approach the net. As he gets older and his game becomes even more one-dimensional, it’s only fitting that he breaks some of his own records, continuing past the age when most of his peers retire in order to hit even more aces and play even more tiebreaks.

Juan Martin del Potro’s Daunting Semi-final Assignments

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Italian translation at settesei.it

This afternoon, Juan Martin del Potro will take on Rafael Nadal for a place in the 2018 US Open championship match. Forgive me if this sounds familiar: It’s the third time Delpo and Rafa have squared off in Flushing’s final four. Every time the Argentine has made it this far in New York, it’s been the King of Clay waiting on the other side of the net.

Del Potro could be forgiven for wondering if he was born in the wrong era. Today is his sixth major semi-final, and his fourth against Rafa. The other two weren’t cakewalks either. His first appearance in the last four of a grand slam was at the 2009 French Open against Roger Federer, and his best-ever performance at Wimbledon gave him a semi-final meeting with Novak Djokovic. The only slight positive in all this is that he faced Federer in Paris and Nadal so often in New York. Technically, it could have been worse.

Simply reaching six major semi-finals is an achievement in itself. Since 1977, there have been only 35 players to reach five or more. For each of those players, I calculated the average surface-specific Elo of their opponents, as well as their average chances of winning. Measured by opponent Elo, Delpo has had the fourth most difficult semi-final assignments of any of these players. The table below shows each player’s number of semi-finals, number of wins, average chance of winning those matches (“Avg p(W)”) and the Elo rating of their average opponent (“Avg Opp Elo”):

Player                 SFs  Wins  Avg p(W)  Avg Opp Elo  
David Ferrer             6     1       35%         2202  
Pat Cash                 5     3       22%         2194  
Stan Wawrinka            9     4       35%         2163  
Juan Martin del Potro    6     ?       35%         2161  
Vitas Gerulaitis         7     2       36%         2146  
Mats Wilander           14    11       48%         2122  
Jo Wilfried Tsonga       6     1       31%         2122  
Michael Chang            8     4       46%         2121  
Novak Djokovic          31    22       62%         2115  
Andy Murray             21    11       52%         2114

Like Delpo, many of these guys had one frequent foe. David Ferrer drew Djokovic in three semis. Pat Cash faced Ivan Lendl three times in his five chances. Vitas Gerulaitis kept earning meetings with Bjorn Borg. Stan Wawrinka hasn’t played more than two semis against any particular opponent, but that doesn’t mean his draws have been any easier: He’s faced Djokovic, Federer, and Andy Murray twice each.

Djokovic and Murray pop up at the bottom of the top ten largely because of Federer and Nadal. It’s a tough era, even if you hold a Big Four membership card. Roger and Rafa have had it easier, ranked 24th and 26th in opponent Elo*, in part due to the number of majors they contested before Djokovic and Murray had fully developed–and because they generally avoided playing each other.

* Federer’s average opponent has had an Elo of 2056, and Nadal’s has had a 2045 Elo. Michael Stich is the only player on this list whose opponents’ Elos averaged below 2000.

Today’s match gives Delpo an opportunity to put himself a bit closer to Wawrinka’s category and surpass the likes of Ferrer and Jo Wilfried Tsonga, who reached only one major final each. Based on his own Elo and those of his opponents, del Potro has had about a one-in-three chance of winning his semis. The 2018 US Open represents his sixth, meaning we’d expect two final appearances thus far. Then again, it’s one thing to run the numbers; it’s another thing to beat Rafael Nadal in a major semi-final … twice.

Marketa Vondrousova’s Next-Level Lottery Match

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Vondrousova sits in awe of her own statistical feat.

Italian translation at settesei.it

By most measures, Marketa Vondrousova wasn’t supposed to win her third-round encounter with Kiki Bertens at the US Open on Saturday. She won a mere 47.1% of points, 12 fewer than Bertens, and she lost her own service game two more times than she broke her opponent’s. That’s not all:

The trick is in the scoreline: 7-6(4) 2-6 7-6(1). Her two sets weren’t as dominant as Bertens’s one, but the Czech was a bit better in the high-leverage moments, especially in the third-set tiebreak. And that’s all: Measured by almost all the peripheral stats available, Bertens played better on Saturday.

Vondrousova’s victory was what has come to be termed a “lottery match.” I use the phrase to refer to all matches in which neither player wins more than 53% of total points, the threshold at which it is almost guaranteed that the winner will be the competitor who wins more points. Between 50% and 53%, clutch and luck play a bigger part. While Vondrousova’s 47.1% is rarely good enough to come out on top–only two WTA matches so far this year have gone the way of a player who won less–it’s possible. According to my win probability model, when a player wins 63% of service points and 44% on return, she’ll end up triumphant 82% of the time.

A unique feat

Lottery matches are fairly common, and matches won by the player who claimed fewer points aren’t that unusual either. Since 2013, there have been about 100 of them each year on the WTA tour, accounting for nearly one in every twenty contests. The rarity of what Vondrousova managed in New York is summed up by Ravi Ubha’s tweet. Usually, the winner in such matches has something going for her, like good fortune on break point chances, or even a beneficial dearth of double faults.

I narrowed Ubha’s list down to five items: total points won (TPW), return points won (RPW), breaks of serve, aces, and double faults. The first two track each other quite closely, but sometimes if one player must serve a lot more than the other, she can win return points at a higher rate than her opponent despite a lower overall TPW. The last three are more independent. Ace and double fault totals aren’t particularly crucial to match outcomes–there are innumerable cases in which players lead in one or both categories yet go home empty-handed–but as they add to the uniqueness of Vondrousova’s feat, I’ve included them here. I would have liked to consider winners and unforced errors as well, but those stats are only published by the grand slams.

Of the 532 loser-won-more-points matches I identified between 2013 and 2018 (not including the US Open), 192 met the first three criteria: The winner had a lower TPW, a lower RPW, and fewer breaks of serve than her opponent. Of those 192, the set that met all five numbers only 39–about 0.3% of the WTA matches in that span with available match stats. Six of those matches happened this year, though two were at WTA $125K events, which some people probably wouldn’t include. (One of them was the Anning $125K final between Irina Khromacheva and the truly unfortunate Saisai Zheng.)

Before Saturday’s match, Coco Vandeweghe was the most-frequent victim of these next-level lottery matches–surprising, because she so often out-aces her opponents–having been victimized three times. Five other players have ended up on the wrong side twice: Johanna Konta, Kristyna Pliskova, Varvara Lepchenko, Alison Van Uytvanck, and … Kiki Bertens. Bertens will move into a tie with Vandeweghe when this year’s US Open matches are entered into the record books.

Bertens has enjoyed a season to remember thus far, winning titles in Charleston and Cincinnati, reaching the championship match in Madrid, and defeating ten of her last eleven top-ten opponents. Her loss to Vondrousova won’t go down as one of the season highlights but, as in so many of her other matches this year, Bertens can be confident she was the better player that day.

Simona Halep’s Grand Slam First Round Woes

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the first-ever match at the US Open’s new Louis Armstrong Stadium yesterday, No. 1 seed and reigning French Open champion Simona Halep lasted barely an hour, losing to the big-hitting Kaia Kanepi. Halep has held the top ranking for more than six months running, and only ten women have owned the top spot for more total weeks than she has. But Halep fans aren’t exactly the the target market for second-week tickets at the majors.

As Christopher Clarey pointed out on Twitter, yesterday’s loss was Halep’s 12th first-round exit in 34 tries. That isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: Seven of the losses came in her first 12 entries, before she entered the top 50, and since Wimbledon 2013, she’s a more respectable 17-5, with one of those losses to Maria Sharapova in New York last year. Still, it’s not the type of winning percentage you’d expect to see from someone of her caliber.

Just how bad is it? To give us some context, I compared her record in her first 34 majors to other grand slam winners, as well as everybody else whose career lasted long enough to enter at least 30 slam main draws. The deeper we dig, the worse it looks.

Simona vs slam winners

I found 32 major champions who played at least 30 slam first rounds*. Most of them played more than that, but to make sure we compare like to like, I’m focusing on each player’s first 34 majors. The list is topped by some of the usual suspects: Chris Evert, Monica Seles, and Serena Williams all went undefeated in their first 34 round-of-128 matches.

* I’ve excluded majors with fewer than 128 entrants, and my database might be missing first-round results from a few more events early in the Open era. Technically, I’m looking only at round-of-128 results.

The average grand slam champion went 29-5 in her first 34 major first rounds. Only four, including Halep, lost at least 12 of those matches: Angelique Kerber also went 22-12, while Flavia Pennetta and Samantha Stosur lost 13. Only two others lost more than seven first rounders: Marion Bartoli went 24-10 in her first 34 first-round efforts, and Iva Majoli ended up at 23-11.

Simona vs the pack

I found 199 players in Open era history who have contested at least 30 round-of-128 matches at majors. That’s a fairly elite crew–as we’ve seen, more than 15 percent of them are slam champions. It’s challenge enough to maintain a high enough ranking to enter nearly a decade’s worth of majors.

Thus, our remaining 167-player sample of non-champions is still better than average: Considering each of their first 34 majors, they won 57.4% of their opening round matches. That translates into a record of 20-14, only a couple of wins worse than how Halep has fared so far. 58 of the 167 women, about 35%, won at least 22 of their first 34. 45 of them, or 27%, outdid Simona and won at least 23.

Two explanations spring to mind for the discrepancy between Halep’s status at the top of the game and her mediocre career performance at the majors. First, players are taking longer to develop into stars. Simona’s 5-7 record in her first 12 first rounds isn’t indicative of her current level. Standouts of prior generations, like Serena and Seles, skipped that level of development entirely, springing onto the scene as instant contenders. Even Jelena Ostapenko, the almost-still-teenage winner of the 2017 French Open, was a modest 7-5 in her first dozen major first rounds. Sloane Stephens, who won 11 of her first 12 (including one against Halep), currently sits at a more modest 19-8.

The other reason is more prosaic: the parity at the top of the women’s game. Even as Simona racks up weeks as number one, she just isn’t as good as many previous top-ranked players. Her greatness stems from managing to stay at a reasonably high level more consistently than any of her peers. That means lots of of second-tier titles, impressive (overall) won-loss records, and on the flip side, some unfortunate losses on big stages. On a tour without a dominant presence, that’s good enough to make her, by a healthy margin, the best in the game. But “best” is more fragile than it used to be, even in the first round of the grand slams.

Gerald Melzer’s 28-Point Hold, and Other Interminable Deuce Games

Italian translation at settesei.it

Last week during the second round of US Open qualifying, Gerald Melzer battled through a 28-point service game–that’s eleven deuces–en route to defeating Kenny De Schepper. (Perhaps mentally exhausted, he lost the next day to Felix Auger-Aliassime.) Watching the scoreboard from a nearby court, I assumed it had malfunctioned and the match was long over.

Such marathon games are rare, but they aren’t unheard of. Yesterday, another qualifier, Lloyd Harris, needed ten deuces to hang on to one game against Gilles Simon in their first round match. Neither Melzer’s nor Harris’s tally are close to the record, which is likely still a 28-deuce game in a 1996 contest between Alberto Berasategui and Marcelo Filippini. That’s 62 points–one point more than the legendary 28-minute full match between Bernard Tomic and Jarkko Nieminen. The entire match. An even longer game, spanning 37 deuces and 80 points, took place at the non-tour-sanctioned Surrey Championships in 1975.

The odds on paper

On the ATP tour, the server wins about 63% of points. In the last year, Melzer has won roughly 64%, about the same as De Schepper’s opponents, so we’ll use the slightly higher number. With a server winning 64% of points, the odds of reaching deuce are 24.4%. After that, the chances of getting to another deuce are a bit less than half, or 46.1%. The odds of an at-least-two-deuce game are 24.4% times 46.1%, the odds of an at-least-three-deuce game are 24.4% times 46.1% times 46.1%, and so on. Melzer’s eleven-deuce game is 24.4% times (46.1% ^ 10), a little bit better than one in ten thousand. The match required 30 games, so the chances of a 28-point game (or longer) at some point–assuming the underlying numbers are the same for De Schepper’s service games–are roughly 30 times better, one in three hundred.

The Simon-Harris 26-pointer is even more likely. On the challenger tour, Harris has won nearly 65% of his service points, while Simon wins better than 40% of return points against tougher competition. Combining those numbers to account for competition is beyond the scope of this post, but let’s say Harris was expected to win 61% of his service points. (He ended up winning only half, though that overall rate is heavily influenced by the marathon game.) The odds of any individual Harris service game lasting 26 points, assuming a 61% serve win rate, is about one in three thousand.

One last example: The Berasategui-Filippini record-setter was primed for some long games, as neither player won very many serve points, and the Casablanca clay has never been speedy. But even with favorable circumstances, 28 deuces is nearly impossible. Using a service points won rate of 58% for Filippini (he won 59.6% that year, while Berasategui’s opponents won 57.7%, and I’ve rounded down a tiny bit for the surface), the odds of an individual game lasting at least 62 points are nearly one in one billion.

Delayed toilet breaks

Let’s see how well the odds predict the real-life frequency of marathon games. In my database of about 435,000 tour-level games back to 2012, 42 games reached the 28-point mark, a rate of approximately one per ten thousand–the same as the theoretical number we saw for Melzer-De Schepper. Many of the games terminated after 28 points, and none went longer than 36 points. The most recent 36-pointer was in this year’s Australian Open third round, when Kyle Edmund broke Nikoloz Basilashvili’s serve (and his spirit) to take a 2-0 lead in the fourth set.

28-pointers–and long games in general–are a bit more common on the challenger tour. I found 81 in about 600,000 games–about one per 7,500 games–including three 38-pointers. Edmund figured in one of those prolonged games, barely failing to break Grega Zemlja’s serve at the 2016 Dallas Challenger. Melzer appears in the list as well, having fought through 28 points to hold against Robin Haase in the 2015 Trnava Challenger, though he ended up losing the match.

Theory and practice also match when we look at WTA data. Using a tour-average rate of service points won of 58%, we would expect to see a 28-pointer once every 4,600 games or so. In 367,000 recorded games, I found 89 instances, or one per 4,100. The record here outstrips anything in the last few years of ATP or Challenger data: Mathilde Johansson broke Elena Vesnina on the 40th point, after 17 deuces. She consolidated the break to win the second set, but dropped the decider.

Based on the last several years of data, Berasategui’s and Filippini’s record appears to be safe. Given the efforts to speed up the game, in which tennis executives would prefer no-ad to Berasategui’s brand of 28-ad, that’s probably for the best.

The Unique Late-Career Surge of Mihaela Buzarnescu

The newest member of the WTA top 32 got there the hard way. Mihaela Buzarnescu, who achieved her latest career-high ranking with a run to the final of last week’s Prague event, where she lost a three-setter to Petra Kvitova, made her professional debut 14 years ago. Despite a dose of junior success, including a junior doubles title at the 2006 US Open, she didn’t crack the top 100 until last October.

This isn’t how tennis career trajectories are supposed to work. Yes, the game is getting older and stars are extending their careers, but Buzarnescu’s year-long winning spree, in which she has climbed from outside the top 400 to inside the top 40, began after her 29th birthday. The closer we look at what the Romanian has achieved, and the age at which she’s doing so, the more unusual it appears.

The oldest top 100 debuts

Since the beginning of the 1987 season, 630 women have debuted in the top 100. Their average age, on the Monday they reached the ranking threshold, is just under 20 years and 6 months. Only 29 of the 630–less than five percent–broke into the top 100 after their 26th birthday.

Only 14 players did so after turning 27:

Player                 Debut  Age (Y)  Age (D)  Peak Rank  
Tzipi Obziler       20070219       33      306         75  
A. Villagran Reami  19880801       31      359         99  
Mihaela Buzarnescu  20171016       29      165         32  
Julie Ditty         20071105       28      305         89  
Eva Bes Ostariz     20010716       28      183         90  
Mashona Washington  20040719       28       49         50  
Maureen Drake       19990201       27      317         47  
Tatjana Maria       20150406       27      241         46  
Hana Sromova        20051107       27      211         87  
Laura Siegemund     20150914       27      193         27  
Flora Perfetti      19960708       27      160         54  
Louise Allen        19890227       27       51         83  
Kristina Barrois    20081020       27       20         57  
Iryna Bremond       20111017       27       11         93

Buzarnescu doesn’t quite top this list, but she is certainly a more consequential force on tour than either of the women who debuted at a more advanced age. Tzipi Obziler fought her way through the lower levels of the game for just as long as Buzarnescu did, though she never cracked the top 70. Adriana Villagran Reami played a limited schedule; she may have had the skills to play top-100 tennis long before the ranking table made it official, but she was never a tour regular.

The most comparable player to Buzarnescu is Laura Siegemund, who reached a double-digit ranking a few years ago, and has since climbed as high as No. 27. Of the oldest top-100 debutants, though, very few have continued to ascend the rankings as far as Buzarnescu and Siegemund have.

Here are the oldest top-100 debuts of players who went on to crack the top 32:

Player                      Debut  Age (Y)  Age (D)  Peak  
Mihaela Buzarnescu       20171016       29      165    32  
Laura Siegemund          20150914       27      193    27  
Sybille Bammer           20050822       25      117    19  
Shinobu Asagoe           20000710       24       12    21  
Manon Bollegraf          19880215       23      310    29  
Johanna Konta            20140623       23       37     4  
Anne Kremer              19981019       23        2    18  
Lesia Tsurenko           20120528       22      364    29  
Kveta Peschke            19980420       22      286    26  
Petra Cetkovska          20071022       22      256    25  
Tathiana Garbin          20000214       22      229    22  
Li Na                    20041004       22      221     2  
Mara Santangelo          20040202       22      219    27  
Ginger Helgeson Nielsen  19910325       22      192    29  
Casey Dellacqua          20070806       22      176    26

Here’s an indication of just how young women’s tennis is: The 9th-oldest top-100 debutant on this list achieved her feat before her 23rd birthday. Put another way: Of the 107 women to break into the top 100 after their 23rd birthday, only eight went on to a ranking of No. 32 or better. By comparison, about one-third of all top-100 players peak at a ranking in the top 32. In this category, Buzarnescu is charting entirely new territory.

Making up for lost time

The last six months or so have been a whirlwind for the Romanian, as she has gone from a fringe tour player that no one had ever heard of, to a solid tour regular that … well, most fans still don’t know much about. Many players need some time to adjust to the higher level of competition and spend months, even years, stagnating in the rankings. Buzarnescu, on the other hand, has barely stopped to take a breath.

It took 203 days from her top-100 debut last October to her latest career-high at No. 32 on Monday. Siegmund, by comparison, needed 315 days; Sybille Bammer took 574 days; Roberta Vinci, who eventually cracked the top ten, required 2,520 days, or nearly seven years. The average player who reaches the top 32 needs two and a half years between her first appearance in the top 100 and clearing the higher bar.

Buzarnescu’s climb doesn’t fit the mold of older debuts. Her climb has more in common with those of teenage sensations. Again since 1987, here are the 20 quickest ascents:

Player              Age (Y)  Age (D)  Peak  Ascent Days  
Jennifer Capriati        14       11     1            0  
Anke Huber               15      266     4           49  
Agnes Szavay             18      164    13           77  
Lindsay Davenport        16      238     1          112  
Naoko Sawamatsu          17       31    14          119  
Clarisa Fernandez        20      265    26          133  
Maria Sharapova          16       58     1          133  
Serena Williams          16       52     1          133  
Miriam Oremans           20      145    25          140  
Venus Williams           16      301     1          147  
Sofia Arvidsson          21      223    29          154  
Leila Meskhi             19      308    12          168  
Tatiana Golovin          16       22    12          175  
Eugenie Bouchard         19       42     5          189  
Martina Hingis           14       31     1          189  
Ana Ivanovic             16      361     1          196  
Conchita Martinez        16      107     2          196  
Mihaela Buzarnescu       29      165    32          203  
Darya Kasatkina          18      137    11          203  
Ashleigh Barty           20      316    16          210

The player Buzarnescu knocked out of the top 20: Kim Clijsters. She is the only woman on the list to have cracked the top 100 after her 22nd birthday, yet here she is, climbing from No. 101 to No. 32 in less time than 92% of her peers.

Common sense suggests that Buzarnescu can climb only so much higher: Most players don’t set new career highs in their 30s, especially those who have such a short track record of tour-level success. On the other hand, she has adapted quickly, recording her first top ten win, over Jelena Ostapenko, in February and taking a set from Kvitova in Saturday’s final.

What’s more, she’ll reap the benefits of seeds at many events, probably including Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Having proven that she can defeat top 50 players–she holds a 6-7 career record against them–her new status as a top-32 player means she’ll get plenty of opportunities to rack up points against a less-daunting brand of competition. After more a decade of fighting steeply uphill battles, she has finally–improbably–earned a place among the game’s elite. Now all she has to do is keep winning.

Rafael Nadal and the Greatest Single-Tournament Performances

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the last two weeks, Rafael Nadal recorded his 11th titles in both Monte Carlo and Barcelona. His career records at those two events, along with his ten Roland Garros championships, reflect a level of dominance never before seen on a single surface. They have to be considered among the greatest achievements in tennis history, and perhaps in all of sport.

The tennis fan in me is content to speculate about whether anyone will ever stop him. The analyst wants to dig deeper: Has Nadal’s performance at one of the tournaments been even better than the rest? How do these single-event records compare to other exploits, such as Roger Federer’s trophy haul at Wimbledon, or Bjorn Borg’s nearly-undefeated career at the French Open?

Barcelona by the numbers

Let’s start with Barcelona. Since 2005–we’ll ignore his 2003 appearance as a 16-year-old wild card–he has played the event 13 times, winning 11 of them. That’s a won-loss record of 57-2.

Usually, I would calculate the probability of a player winning so many tournaments in that many chances, then come up with a tiny percentage that would represent his odds of achieving such a feat. That would miss the mark here. Instead, I want to look at the problem from the opposite perspective: In order to win so many titles, how good must Nadal be?

We already know that Rafa is the best of all time on clay, in general. Using the Elo rating system, his peak surface-specific rating–that is, Elo calculated using only results on clay courts–is over 2,500, better than anyone else on clay … or anyone else on any surface. (Nadal’s current clay-specific Elo is around 2,400, and the closest things he has to rivals on the surface right now, Dominic Thiem and Kei Nishikori, sit at about 2,190 and 2,150. Stefanos Tsitsipas’s rating is 1865.) Since Rafa has posted his best results at these three events, it stands to reason that his tournament-specific levels are even higher.

Here, then, is the method we can use to figure that out. First, for each year he entered Barcelona, determine his path to the title. (For the 11 titles, that’s easy; for the other two, we use the players he would have faced had he kept winning.) Using each opponent’s clay court Elo rating at the time of the match, we can determine the odds that various hypothetical (and dominant) players would have progressed through the draw and won the title.

Here is Nadal’s path to the 2018 title, showing each player’s pre-match clay court Elo*, along with the odds that Rafa (given his own current rating) would beat him:

Round  Opponent                 Opp Elo  p(Rafa W)  
R32    Roberto Carballes Baena     1767      97.3%  
R16    Guillermo Garcia Lopez      1769      97.2%  
QF     Martin Klizan               1894      94.5%  
SF     David Goffin                2079      84.5%  
F      Stefanos Tsitsipas          1900      94.3%

* from this point on, the clay court Elos I use are 50/50 blends of clay-specific Elo–that is, a rating calculating only with clay court results–and overall Elo. The blended rating is the one that has proven best at predicting match outcomes. Nadal is the all-time leader in this category as well, with a 50/50 clay Elo that peaked around 2,510.

Given those five single-match probabilities, the odds that Nadal would win the tournament were just over 70%. That’s dominant, but it’s not 11-out-of-13 dominant.

What if Rafa were underrated by Elo, at least in Barcelona? Here is the probability that a player at various Elo ratings would have beaten the five opponents that he faced last week:

Clay Elo  p(2018 Title)  
2200              41.2%  
2250              50.4%  
2300              59.1%  
2350              66.9%  
2400              73.6%  
2450              79.3%  
2500              83.9%  
2550              87.6%  
2600              90.5%

It turns out that this year’s title path was one of the weakest since 2005. It is roughly equivalent to the players Nadal needed to defeat in 2006 (with Nicolas Almagro in the semis and Tommy Robredo in the final), and a bit tougher than last year’s route, which didn’t feature a top-50 player until Thiem in the final. The toughest was his hypothetical path in 2015, when he lost to Fabio Fognini in the second round. Had he progressed, he would have faced David Ferrer in the semis and Nishikori in the final.

Once we figure out the quality of Rafa’s opponents (and would-have-been opponents, for the two years he lost early), we can work out the odds that any player–given those paths–would have won the tournament each year.

If we assume that Rafa’s average level since 2005 is the same as his current level–a clay Elo of around 2,400–the odds that he would have won 11 Barcelona titles in 13 tries is 13.0%. We don’t have the luxury of replaying those 13 tournaments in a few thousand alternate universes, so it’s not entirely clear what to make of that number–was Rafa lucky? would he do it again, given the chance? is he actually way better than an Elo level of 2,400 in Barcelona?

I don’t know the answer to those questions; all we know is what happened. To compare (un)decimas (and related accomplishments by other players), we’re going to look at the Elo level that would have resulted in the achievement at least 50% of the time. In other words, how good would Nadal have to have been to give himself a 50/50 chance at winning 11 Barcelona titles in 13 tries?

At various clay Elo levels, here are the odds that Rafa would have completed the Barcelona undécima:

Clay Elo  p(11 of 13)  
2300             1.0%  
2350             4.6%  
2400            13.0%  
2450            28.0%  
2500            47.2%  
2550            64.2%  
2600            77.7%  
2650            87.3%  
2700            93.1%

Thus, a player with a clay Elo of about 2,505 would have had a 50% chance of matching Nadal’s feat at his home tournament. To put it another way: At this event, over a span of 14 years, he has played at a level roughly equal to his career peak which, incidentally, is the all-time best clay Elo rating ever achieved by an ATP player.

Comparing las (un)decimas

I hope that my method makes sense and seems like a reasonable way of quantifying a rare feat. Algorithm in hand, we can compare Nadal’s Barcelona record with his efforts in Monte Carlo and Paris.

Monte Carlo

Rafa has entered 14 times since 2005 (again, excluding his 2003 appearance) and won 11. That’s a bit less impressive than 11-of-13, but the competition level is much higher. Only last year’s tournament, in which the opposing finalist was Albert Ramos, is in the same league as most of the Barcelona draws.

Sure enough, the Monte Carlo undécima is lot more impressive. To have a 50% chance of winning 11 titles in 14 attempts, a player would need a clay Elo of about 2,595, almost 100 points higher than the comparable number for Barcelona, and well above the level any player has ever achieved, even at their peak.

Roland Garros

At the French Open, Nadal has entered 13 times, winning 10. The field is even more challenging than in Monte Carlo, but on the other hand, the five-set format gives a greater edge to favorites, lessening the chance of an underdog scoring an upset with two magical sets.

The Roland Garros 10-of-13 is not quite as eye-popping as the record at Monte Carlo. The clay Elo required to give a player a 50% chance of matching Nadal’s French Open feat is “only” around 2,570–still better than any player has ever attained, but a bit short of the comparable mark for Monte Carlo.

But wait … what about 2016? Rafa won two rounds and then withdrew from his third-rounder against Marcel Granollers. I don’t know whether that should count, but at least for argument’s sake, we should run the numbers without it, treating Nadal’s French Open record as 10 titles in 12 appearances, not 13. In that case, the clay Elo that would give a player a 50/50 shot at matching the record is 2,595–the same as the Monte Carlo number.

At the moment, Monte Carlo appears to be the tournament where Nadal has played his very best. With another French Open a few weeks away, though, that answer may be temporary.

Rafa vs other record holders

A few other players have racked up impressive totals at single events. Wikipedia has a convenient list, and a few accomplishments stand out: Federer’s tallies at Wimbledon, Basel, and Halle, Guillermo Vilas’s eight titles in Buenos Aires, and Borg’s six French Open titles in only eight appearances.

Let’s have a look at how they compare, ranked by the surface-specific Elo rating that would give a player a 50% chance of equaling the feat:

Player   Tourney          Wins  Apps  50% Elo  
Nadal    Monte Carlo        11    14     2595  
Nadal    French Open*       10    12     2595  
Nadal    French Open        10    13     2570  
Borg     French Open**       6     7     2550  
Nadal    Barcelona          11    13     2505  
Borg     French Open         6     8     2475  
Vilas    Buenos Aires***     8    10     2285  
Federer  Wimbledon           7    18     2285  
Federer  Halle               8    15     2205  
Federer  Basel               8    15     2180

* excluding 2016

** excluding 1973, when Borg was 16 years old, and lost in the fourth round

*** excluding 1969-71, both because Vilas was very young, and due to sketchy data

The only single-event achievement that ranks with Nadal’s is Borg’s record at Roland Garros–and even then, only when we don’t consider Borg’s loss there as a 16-year-old. Federer’s records in Wimbledon, Halle, and Basel are impressive, but fail to rate as highly because he has entered those tournaments so many times. Federer didn’t appear on tour ready to win everything on his chosen surface, the way Rafa did, and those early losses are part of the reason that his records at these tournaments are so low.

We never needed any numbers to know that Nadal’s accomplishments at his three favorite tournaments are among the best of all time. With these results, though, we can see just how dominant he has been, and how few achievements in tennis history can even compare. The scary thing: A month from now, I may need to come back and update this post with even more eye-popping numbers. The greatest show on clay courts isn’t over yet.

Albert Ramos’s Record-Setting Doubles Futility

Last week, we learned that Albert Ramos is not very good at doubles. In Barcelona, he lost his first-round doubles match, running his losing streak to 21 straight and his career tour-level record to an astonishing 14-79.

Ramos hasn’t won a doubles match since Marrakech last year, so he has fallen off the doubles ranking list entirely. Elo isn’t so kind: Of the 268 players with at least one tour-level doubles match since 2014, Ramos ranks dead last, with an Elo rating of 1260, 130 points behind the second worst, Paul-Henri Mathieu, and 240 points below the default rating of 1500 given to a player when he first arrives on tour. If two players with Ramos’s rating were to play an elite team like Kontinen/Peers, Elo would give the Ramos team little more than a 2% chance of winning.

It turns out that the Barcelona loss was a notable one, setting the mark for the longest tour-level doubles losing streak since 2000. Here is the list:

PLAYER               LOSSES     YEARS  
Albert Ramos             21   2016-17*  
Florent Serra            20   2008-10  
Lars Burgsmuller         18   2001-03  
Ryan Sweeting            17   2010-12  
Mikhail Kukushkin        17   2014-16  
Gael Monfils             16   2012-15  
Jack Waite               16   2001-02  
Mikhail Youzhny          16   2002-03  
Luke Jensen              15   2000-02  
Ratiwatana brothers      15   2008-09  
Taylor Dent              15   2001-04

* active streak

My database isn’t as complete before 2000, so I can’t confidently say whether there were longer streaks earlier in ATP history.

Among active players, Ramos’s run of futility stands far above the pack. There are 14 players with active streaks of 8 or more tour-level losses, though as you’ll see, I’m defining “active” quite broadly:

PLAYER                STREAK  START  
Albert Ramos              21   2016  
Lukas Lacko               13   2012  
James Ward                11   2010  
Marinko Matosevic         11   2014  
Jimmy Wang                11   2006  
Zhe Li                    11   2010  
Omar Awadhy               10   2002  
Jose Rubin Statham        10   2006  
Mikhail Youzhny           10   2015  
Paul Henri Mathieu         9   2016  
Juan Monaco                9   2015  
Lucas Pouille              8   2016  
Andre Begemann             8   2016  
Daniel Gimeno Traver       8   2015

Many of the players on this list are attempting comebacks from injury or trying to rebuild their rankings to enter more ATP events, so few of them are likely to threaten Ramos’s mark. If he continues on tour, Mathieu may have the best chance: He has racked up five different losing streaks of 8 or more matches, including a 12-loss stretch between 2002 and 2005.

One of the things that makes Ramos’s streak so remarkable is that he has continued to enter doubles draws so frequently, playing both singles and doubles in 20 of his 31 events. Some of his peers have had poor doubles seasons, but few of them have kept trying so assiduously. Here are the 15 players with the worst doubles winning percentages in the last 52 weeks, minimum 10 matches:

PLAYER                   MATCHES  WINS  WIN PERC  
Albert Ramos                  20     0      0.0%  
Jiri Vesely                   10     1     10.0%  
Alexander Bury                13     2     15.4%  
Taylor Fritz                  11     2     18.2%  
Gilles Simon                  11     2     18.2%  
Benoit Paire                  16     3     18.8%  
Inigo Cervantes Huegun        10     2     20.0%  
Lucas Pouille                 15     3     20.0%  
Hans Podlipnik Castillo       13     3     23.1%  
Paolo Lorenzi                 33     8     24.2%  
Marcos Baghdatis              12     3     25.0%  
Adrian Mannarino              15     4     26.7%  
Andreas Seppi                 15     4     26.7%  
Joao Sousa                    30     8     26.7%  
Neal Skupski                  17     5     29.4%

Paolo Lorenzi might be a bit better than his position on this list makes him look: Over the last year, he has partnered Ramos four times, more than any other player.

Then again, Lorenzi has struggled with plenty of doubles partners. Here are the least successful doubles players since 2000, minimum 50 matches:

PLAYER              MATCHES  WINS  WIN PERC  
Albert Ramos             93    14     15.1%  
Robby Ginepri            97    21     21.6%  
Gilles Simon            151    33     21.9%  
Gael Monfils             92    21     22.8%  
Adrian Mannarino         58    14     24.1%  
Benoit Paire             93    23     24.7%  
Paul Henri Mathieu      105    26     24.8%  
Jack Waite               68    17     25.0%  
Florent Serra            72    18     25.0%  
Santiago Giraldo         99    27     27.3%  
Aleksandar Kitinov       88    24     27.3%  
Marinko Matosevic        61    17     27.9%  
Bernard Tomic            63    18     28.6%  
Younes El Aynaoui        56    16     28.6%  
Paolo Lorenzi           104    30     28.8%

Ramos, once again, is in a league of his own. Beyond him and Robby Ginepri, the list is dominated by a surprising number of Frenchmen, including Florent Serra, who outranks several of his countrymen, but appeared earlier with the 20-match losing streak that Ramos finally overtook.

Ironically, since Ramos’s losing streak has coincided with career-best success on the singles circuit, he will find it easier than ever to enter doubles draws. With the press that comes with the streak, however, potential partners may finally think twice before signing up with the worst tour-level doubles player of their generation.