Category: Streaks

Erasing Love-40 Three Times In a Row

During last week’s marathon fourth-rounder at Indian Wells, Daniil Medvedev tucked an unusual feat inside his 6-7, 7-6, 7-5 defeat of Alexander Zverev. Starting with the 12th game of the first set, he recovered from a 0-40 deficit in three consecutive service games.

Voo de Mar noticed:

Peter asked me if this had ever happened before, so here we are. The short answer is: I’m not sure (at least at ATP tour level), because I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. However, I have the sequence for enough matches to confirm that it’s extremely rare.

Theory first

Just falling behind 0-40 is unusual. ATP-level servers win about 65% of points, so a basic model would predict that 0-40 happens in 4.3% of service games. It’s actually more frequent than that–about 5.4%–partly because the tour does not consist of identical servers, and partly because there’s probably some streakiness involved.

Back to theory: “Erasing” a 0-40 deficit means winning three service points after losing the first three. The odds of that particularly six-point sequence–again, assuming the server wins 65% of points–is 1.2%.

The historical record agrees exactly. Across 18,000 tour-level matches from 2010s, I found that the server falls to 0-40 and recovers to deuce exactly 1.2% of the time.

Three in a row is a different story entirely. If there’s a 1% probability of something occurring once, there’s a 0.0001%–literally, one in a million–chance that it will happen three times in a row. On the other hand, there are a lot of matches and a lot of service games. Using some rough assumptions for the number of games in a match and the number of matches per season, my ballpark estimate is that we should see a rarity like this about once in every 10-12 ATP seasons.

The data

Like I said, I don’t have the point-by-point sequence for every match. But I do have it for over 18,000 ATP matches between 2011 and early 2019. (Much of that data, plus equivalent data for women’s tennis, is here.) In that dataset, there was only one instance when a player apparently erased a 0-40 deficit three times in a row: 2011 Kuala Lumpur, where Mischa Zverev managed it against Philipp Petzschner.

Except… I’m not so sure. In 2011, betting sites were just starting to collect and publish point-by-point data, and some of it was approximate. For this particular match, there is a suspicious number of streaks, a sign that the data wasn’t reported precisely. For instance, in all three of the 0-40 rescues, Zverev purportedly won the next five points in a row. It’s possible, but we have to leave a question mark next to this one.

We can, however, broaden the search. 6,800 ATP qualifying matches? No one managed three 0-40 recoveries in a row. 28,000 Challenger matches? Now we’re talking–I found five occasions when a player saved three consecutive 0-40 deficits. The most recent was at the 2016 Tallahassee Challenger, where Donald Young accomplished it in a losing effort against Frances Tiafoe. He won the first two of the games, but in the third, serving to stay in the match, he fought back to deuce only to double fault on match point.

I found another five cases out of over 33,000 Futures-level matches. The most recent, a 2017 match between Altug Celikbilek and Francesco Vilardo, was notable because Celikbilek recovered from 0-40 in the 6th, 8th, and 10th games–and in the 7th game, Vilardo did as well!

It’s important to keep in mind that servers do not win as many points at the lower levels of men’s tennis. (Streakiness might also generate more 0-40 scores as well.) In my 2011-2019 data, servers fell to love-40 5.4% of the time at the ATP main draw level, 5.8% in ATP qualifying, 6.4% at Challengers, and 7.7% at Futures. However, that doesn’t end up generating many more recoveries, since servers are more likely to lose those games before evening the score.

If we dump all of these results together, we get 10 occasions (or 11, if you count the Petzschner match) when a player recovered from 0-40 three times in a row, out of approximately 86,400 total matches. That rate suggests that we should see a feat like Medvedev’s once every three or four years on tour. That’s more frequent than my initial calculation, but still quite rare.

Aslan Karatsev Isn’t Better Than Novak Djokovic, But…

What’s better, winning 15 of 17 matches, or going undefeated for 9?

Even if you know that the 15-2 guy is Aslan Karatsev in 2021, and the 9-0 guy is Novak Djokovic this year, there’s no obvious answer. Sure, Djokovic beat Karatsev easily, and Novak’s nine wins included a grand slam title. We know Djokovic is the better player–he’s got more than a decade of proof to support that claim–and no one in their right mind would take Karatsev’s last three months over Novak’s.

True as all of that is, it’s not the question I’m asking.

The player with the 15-2 record has two advantages over his 9-0 peer. First, he has more wins. (Mind-blowing stuff, I know.) Second and more importantly, he has more evidence of his current level, even if it includes two losses. The 9-0 guy could go undefeated for 17 matches… but he could also end up 11-6. His nine-match record simply doesn’t give us as much information.

Again, if you know which players I’m talking about, that doesn’t matter–we have 1,100 matches worth of information about Djokovic, most of which say that his 9-0 is business as usual. He might not win his next eight matches, but he’s certainly not going to lose more than a few of them.

The yElo light at the end of the tunnel

If you’ve been reading my last couple of posts, you know where I’m going with this.

Last week, I introduced the concept of yElo. The “y” stands for year, but it can be used for any unit of time shorter than an entire career. Instead of using every bit of available information, we look only at a designated time frame, such as the 2021 season. While maintaining our knowledge of other players (e.g. Andrey Rublev is a really tough opponent; Egor Gerasimov not so much), we treat each player as if we know nothing else about him.

So truly, we’re comparing Karatsev’s 15-2 with Djokovic’s 9-0, taking into account the quality of their competition.

Plug every ATPer’s 2021 season into the formula, and here are the yElo leaders, through last weekend’s finals in Dubai and Acapulco:

Rank  Player                  W-L  yElo  
1     Aslan Karatsev         15-2  2082  
2     Novak Djokovic          9-0  2081  
3     Daniil Medvedev        13-2  2061  
4     Andrey Rublev          15-3  2006  
5     Marton Fucsovics       14-4  2000  
6     Stefanos Tsitsipas     14-4  1983  
7     Alexander Zverev        9-4  1922  
8     Matteo Berrettini       8-2  1918  
9     Jeremy Chardy          13-6  1915  
10    Lloyd Harris           11-5  1878  
11    Jannik Sinner           9-4  1848  
12    Alexei Popyrin          9-3  1836  
13    Roberto Bautista Agut   8-7  1831  
14    Taylor Fritz            7-4  1830  
15    Sebastian Baez         14-1  1820  
16    Felix Auger Aliassime   8-4  1818  
17    Karen Khachanov         9-5  1810  
18    Mackenzie McDonald     11-5  1809  
19    Tomas Machac           10-3  1806  
20    Daniel Evans            6-3  1800

Yes, Karatsev really does outscore Djokovic. Barely.

We are accustomed to 52-week rankings and Elo ratings that carefully weigh an entire career’s worth of work. So this is a deeply weird list, with only a handful of players anywhere near where we’d expect. #15 and #19 are Challenger-level guys, for crying out loud!

Embrace the race

The official Race to Turin doesn’t look as bizarre as the yElo list, but imagine showing it to someone in December, with Karatsev 5th, Marton Fucsovics 7th, and Rafael Nadal outside the top 20. Both the Race and the yElo list are “wrong” in the traditional sense, but they tell us much more about the 2021 season than the old-fashioned rankings do.

Tennis’s relentless focus on the long view sucks some excitement out of the season. Think of virtually any team sport. A month into the season, some unheralded club has gotten off to a hot start, and at least in some quarters, that’s the story–can they keep it up? should we have seen this coming all along? Nobodies are cast in the role of front-runners, and established stars play the part of underdogs.

In tennis, nobodies are… well, nobodies who won a few matches lately. Superstars play the part of superstars who’ve been taking some time off. Sure, we know that Djokovic and Nadal are going to end up near the top of the rankings list in November, just like we know the Dodgers and Yankees will be in the playoffs. But that doesn’t mean we ought to take it as a foregone conclusion from day one. In baseball, as the saying goes, everybody’s in first place on Opening Day.

Embracing the race–focusing on which players are leading the pack at each point throughout the season–doesn’t have to mean throwing away longer-term rankings. The traditional calculations should still be used for tournament entries and (maybe) for seedings. Top players have earned as much, and tournament entry is a factor that isn’t present in the major team sports.

Everybody wants to know how the ATP will survive when the Big Three are out of the picture. Well, this is a start–pay attention to who’s winning in 2021. If we take yElo’s word for it, a virtual nobody emerged to overtake Djokovic for the #1 spot going into Miami! An Argentinian prospect is playing like a top-15 guy just by winning a bunch of Challengers! Jeremy Chardy is more than just a hitting partner for the other Frenchmen!

The stories are out there, just like they are every year. It’s a shame that they get buried by all the talk about players who won last year.

I’ve added men’s and women’s yElo ratings to the Tennis Abstract website, and they’ll be updated weekly.

The Best 22-Match yElo Streaks

Earlier this week I wrote about Garbine Muguruza’s outstanding start to the season, and I introduced a new method to quantify a player’s level in a relatively short time span. Instead of using traditional Elo, which takes into account everything we know about a player, my new metric, yElo, uses what we know about everyone else, but treats a player’s short-term performance as if it is all we know about her. The parameters for yElo, such as k-value, are the same as the ones I’ve arrived at to make “regular Elo” as predictive as possible.

In other words, we measure Muguruza’s 22 matches in 2021 as if she had never played a WTA event before. As we saw in my earlier post, this approach considers the strength of opponents each player faced, and it rates her 18-4 record as better than anyone else in 2021, including Naomi Osaka’s 10-0 start.*

* excluding walkovers, which I ignore for all versions of Elo and yElo.

Muguruza’s season start has been outstanding and it is definitely underrated by the official WTA rankings and maybe even by the race, but I don’t want to make too much of it–one title in five tournaments in hardly world-historical stuff. On the other hand, it’s a good way to get our feet wet with a new metric that I think will prove useful for a wide range of tennis comparisons.

Garbine vs Garbine

The Spaniard won majors in 2016 and 2017, and she briefly reached number one in the rankings in September of 2017. Those achievements belong on a Hall of Fame plaque over her recent Dubai title and Yarra River Classic final. But was she really playing better back then?

She was not! I ran the yElo formula for every 22-match sequence in Muguruza’s career. The best of the bunch–again, taken entirely out of context, as if we know nothing beyond those 22 matches–was a run late in 2015 when she reached the Wuhan final, won Beijing, then went undefeated in the WTA Finals round robin stage. Her yElo based on those 22 matches was 2172, narrowly better than her 2021 yElo of 2160.

The more memorable moments of her career don’t quite stack up:

Elo   W-L   Span                            
2172  17-5  2015 Wim R16 - WTA Finals RR    
2160  18-4  2021 Abu Dhabi R64 - Dubai F    
2148  18-4  2017 Birmingham R32 - Cinci F   
2122  19-3  2017 Wimb R128 - USO R16 (#1)   
2084  17-5  2017 Miami R64 - Wimb F         
2076  16-6  2016 Doha QF - Roland Garros F

I haven’t shown every 22-match sequence of her career, because that list is long and boring–the streaks heavily overlap with each other, and thus there are often tiny differences between them. But it is instructive to look at the time periods that ended at key moments.

The best of that bunch was the 22-match run ending with Muguruza’s 6-1 6-0 beatdown of Simona Halep at the 2017 Cincinnati final. That set the stage for her ascent to #1, though the ranking move didn’t happen until after the US Open. That streak is close to her current level. The 22 matches leading up to the official #1 takeover are a bit lower (she lost to Petra Kvitova at the US Open, which was less forgivable then than now), and the timespans ending with her two slam finals are still further down the list.

Don’t misunderstand–Muguruza was playing very well throughout all of these time periods. But when we crunch the numbers, we find that her current level is roughly on par with the best she’s ever played.

Garbine vs the world

Metrics are a lot more informative once we gain some context. Many of you probably have a good sense of what regular Elo ratings mean–2100+ is outstanding, 2000+ is top ten-ish, 1900+ is approximately the top 20, and so on. We can piggyback on that for yElo. When Muguruza’s 22-match yElo this season is 2160, it really does mean that, when feeding that very limited set of results into the Elo formula, it thinks Muguruza’s level is close to that of the best player in the world.

Well… the best player in the world right now. There’s no truly dominant force in women’s tennis at the moment, so we’re not seeing players at the top end of the all-time Elo scale. In regular Elo, peak Martina Navratilova and peak Steffi Graf topped 2600, more than 400 points above Osaka’s current rating of 2189. It will not surprise you, then, to learn that Navratilova, Graf, Serena Williams, Chris Evert, and many others put together 22-match runs* that make Muguruza’s 2021 season look positively pedestrian.

* yes, I know how ridiculous it is that this whole article is based on the arbitrary 22-match time span. We could do the same stuff with the more natural-sounding 20-match span, but there wouldn’t be an intuitive way to fit Muguruza’s current run into the discussion. And let’s face it, 20 is just as arbitrary as 22.

Out of my entire database on women’s tennis results going back to 1950 or so, about 100 women have enjoyed a 22-match run that outscores Muguruza’s best. The top of the list is the end of Navratilova’s 1983 season, which is worth a yElo of 2445. Close behind is Monica Seles, who reached 2438 with a streak starting at the end of 1992 and extending into the 1993 season. Three more women topped 2400, another 27 exceeded 2300, and 46 more put together 22 consecutive matches worth at least 2200.

Here are the 15 active women who’ve played at least as well as Muguruza for their best 22-match spans:

yElo  Player                W-L   Year(s)  
2389  Serena Williams       21-1  2001-02  
2386  Venus Williams        22-0  2000     
2335  Kim Clijsters         20-2  2002-03  
2332  Victoria Azarenka     22-0  2012     
2234  Vera Zvonareva        18-4  2008     
2217  Svetlana Kuznetsova   19-3  2004     
2217  Naomi Osaka           20-2  2019-20  
2209  Samantha Stosur       20-2  2010     
2205  Petra Kvitova         19-3  2011-12  
2205  Simona Halep          20-2  2018     
2196  Caroline Garcia       18-4  2017     
2186  Ashleigh Barty        19-3  2019     
2180  Angelique Kerber      18-4  2015-16  
2174  Carla Suarez Navarro  18-4  2015     
2172  Garbine Muguruza      17-5  2015

With the caveat that I haven’t spent much of my life thinking about the best 22-match runs in women’s tennis history, this seems like a credible list. I particularly like how yElo manages to consider strength of opponent to the point that an 18-4 run*, like Zvonareva’s in 2008, can outrank so many 20-2s. (Vera even beats a few 22-0s from the amateur era.)

* the link shows a few extra matches–the 18-4 run starts in the QFs of Guangzhou and ends in the Tour Finals semi-final. Note again that yElo skips retirements.

I hope you find the new yElo metric as interesting as I do. I’ll definitely be doing more with it, since I suspect it has value even outside the narrow context of one player and a single timespan of arbitrary lenth.

Daniil Medvedev, Novak Djokovic, and Top Ten Win Streaks

You might have heard that Daniil Medvedev has quite the streak going. He’s beaten eleven straight top-ten-ranked opponents in a row. The streak began in Paris last fall with victories against Diego Schwartzman and Alexander Zverev, continued with a perfect run in London, and crossed into double digits with a final-round ATP Cup dismissal of Matteo Berrettini. Number 11 was a straight-setter against Andrey Rublev in the Australian Open quarter-finals. He’ll go for 12 in his semi versus Stefanos Tsitsipas, with a potential 13th straight in a championship tilt with Novak Djokovic.

Eleven is pretty darn good. Since the mid-1980s, only six other players have managed that: Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Pete Sampras, Thomas Muster, and Ivan Lendl.

Medvedev and his streak is just at the fringes of that list, though. When we start digging deeper, we find some truly incredible accomplishments.

First off, the longest top-ten winning streak in this span belongs to Federer, who won 24 in a row between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2005. (I found one online reference to a 26-win streak; I guess it’s possible I’m missing something or have some dates reversed, but I’ve double checked my data, and am sticking with 24.) Imagine Medvedev lasting another 52 weeks without losing to a top-ten opponent!

What truly amazes me, though, is not any individual streak. Federer strung together another 17 top-ten wins starting at Wimbledon in 2006, and if that isn’t enough, he ran off another 10-match streak in between the 24 and the 17.

Even Federer’s feats pale next to the rarely-interrupted dominance displayed by Djokovic. Novak, like Medvedev, once had an 11-match win streak against top-tenners. And that’s his seventh longest! Djokovic owns streaks of 17, 14, 14, 13, 13, 12, and 11. (For what it’s worth, he also has an active streak of 2. Could be the start of something big….)

Here’s the complete list of top-ten win streaks of at least 11 matches since 1985:

Streak  Player    Span                        
24      Federer   03 Masters Cup - 05 AO      
17      Djokovic  15 WTF - 16 Rome            
17      Federer   06 Wimb - 07 Dubai          
14      Djokovic  12 Beijing - 13 IW          
14      Djokovic  18 Wimb - WTF               
14      Nadal     12 Miami - 13 Monte Carlo   
13      Djokovic  11 AO - 11 Rome             
13      Djokovic  13 Beijing - Davis Cup F    
13      Nadal     05 Monte Carlo - 06 RG      
13      Sampras   96 WTF - 97 Paris           
12      Djokovic  15 IW - RG                  
12      Nadal     08 Monte Carlo - Toronto    
12      Nadal     13 Madrid - USO             
12      Lendl     87 Hamburg - Sydney Indoor  
12      Muster    95 Davis Cup R1 - Essen     
11      Djokovic  14 Paris - 15 Dubai         
11      Medvedev  20 Paris - 21 AO

Nadal’s showing here is pretty good, too.

The ladies

My main priority here was to put Medvedev’s streak in perspective, but since I’ve got the code handy, let’s aim it at the WTA dataset, too.

The record–again since 1985–belongs to Martina Navratilova, who won 22 straight against top-ten opposition in ’85 and ’86. Navratilova put together another 20 or so after the first streak was broken, Serena Williams and Steffi Graf both ran off streaks around 19, and Justine Henin once won 17 in a row. I’m emphasizing the uncertainty here–and opting not to print a full list–because it will take a bit more legwork to establish exact numbers. Many of these streaks begin or end during the round-robin stage of the year-end finals, and my database doesn’t specify the sequence of those matches.

We can still get a general idea, though. Graf has five separate streaks of 10 or more top-ten wins, and Williams has four. Navratilova has three, though she almost definitely had more in late 1970s and early 1980s, a period for which I lack official ranking data.

The current level of parity on the women’s tour has kept the number of streaks down. No one has gotten to double digits since Serena’s last streak ended at the 2014 tour finals. If you’re looking to Naomi Osaka to change that, you’ll be waiting a long time, as she hasn’t played a top-ten opponent since Brisbane at the start of last year, when she lost the final to Karolina Pliskova. She isn’t quite in Medvedev territory yet–her current streak stands at zero.

The Naomi Osaka First-Set Guarantee

Italian translation at settesei.it

Today in the Australian Open quarter-finals, Naomi Osaka recorded a routine victory, beating 6th seed Elina Svitolina 6-4 6-1. She’ll face Karolina Pliskova in tomorrow’s semi-final, and she has a chance to finish the tournament as the top-ranked player in the world.

(See the bottom of this post for updates.)

Osaka’s sprint to the finish line against Svitolina was what we’ve come to expect from the 21-year-old. The Eurosport commentators shared a remarkable stat: The last 59 times Osaka has won the first set, she has gone on to win the match. (On Eurosport during the match, they said 57, making today’s win 58, but I believe they left out a 2017 win by retirement against Heather Watson in which the first set was completed.) The last time she failed to convert a one-set advantage into a victory was the final match of her 2016 season, in Tianjin against Svetlana Kuznetsova.

Of course, winning the first set is a big advantage for anyone. If two players are evenly matched and there’s no momentum effect, the winner of the first set has a 75% chance of finishing the job. In the real world, the woman who takes the first set is usually the superior player, so her odds in the second and third sets are even better still. On the 2018 WTA tour, the player who claimed first set went on to win the match 81.5% of the time.

Even if Osaka’s theoretical odds of converting one-set advantages are even higher, 59 matches in a row is one heck of a feat. Only 15 women have an active streak of 10 or more consecutive first-set conversions, and a mere four hold a running streak of at least 20. In addition to Osaka, Aryna Sabalenka has converted 25 straight first-set victories, Qiang Wang has won 27 in a row, and Serena Williams is ready to pounce as soon as Osaka falters, with a current tally of 51. Serena’s string of consecutive conversions stretches over an even longer span, back to April 2016, in Miami. (Remember who came back to beat her? Svetlana Kuznetsova.)

It’s no surprise to see Serena showing up near the top of this list. After several years of looking up various tennis records and streaks, I’ve discovered a few general rules. First, if you think you’ve found a noteworthy recent achievement, Serena did it better. Second, if it involves brushing aside the tour’s rank and file, Steffi Graf was even better than Serena. And third, no matter how impressive Serena’s and Steffi’s feats, the all-time record will belong to either Chris Evert or Martina Navratilova.

The first-set-conversion streak no different. In addition to her current streak of 51 straight, Serena won 61 in a row in 2002-03. That’s two matches and three places above Osaka, but it’s only 37th on the all-time list. Graf converted first-set advantages for more than twice as long, tallying 126 in a row from 1989 to 1991. As impressive as that is, my third rule holds with a vengeance: Evert converted 220 in a row between 1978 and 1981 to earn top billing on this list. Navratilova comes in second, but with the consolation that she holds third place as well. Martina and Steffi are the only women with multiple triple-digit streaks.

Here are the longest first-set conversion streaks held by players in the top 40. Many of these women put together multiple streaks of 60 or more, and in those cases I’ve listed only their longest:

Rank  Player                   Matches     Span     Notes  
1     Chris Evert                  220  1978-81  + 3 more  
2     Martina Navratilova          172  1982-84  + 5 more  
4     Steffi Graf                  126  1989-91  + 3 more  
6     Monica Seles                 112  1991-93  + 1 more  
7     Mary Joe Fernandez           105  1989-91            
8     Pam Shriver                  105  1986-88            
9     Vera Zvonareva               103  2006-08            
12    Martina Hingis                86  1996-97            
14    Arantxa Sanchez Vicario       85  1992-93            
16    Victoria Azarenka             79  2011-13            
17    Maria Sharapova               77  2010-12  + 1 more  
19    Margaret Court                74  1969-77            
21    Venus Williams                73  1999-01            
22    Sue Barker                    70  1973-78            
23    Evonne Cawley                 69  1978-80  + 1 more  
24    Lindsay Davenport             67  1999-00  + 1 more  
25    Tracy Austin                  67  1979-80            
26    Virginia Wade                 66  1975-78            
28    Gabriela Sabatini             65  1990-91            
30    Andrea Jaeger                 64  1981-82            
33    Claudia Kohde Kilsch          63  1986-87            
34    Kerry Reid                    62  1969-77            
37    Serena Williams               61  2002-03            
39    Anna Chakvetadze              60  2006-07            
40    Naomi Osaka                   59  2017-19  (active)

* Unfortunately all of these numbers come with a huge caveat. My historical WTA database isn’t perfect. I know that there are Evert and Navratilova matches missing, along with a handful of later results. For records like this, a single missing match could mean that Evert really had two streaks of 110 each, or any number of other permutations that would render my all-time list incorrect. So please, take these records as unofficial, and maybe the WTA will query their own–presumably more complete–database to produce a better list.

This is good company for the reigning US Open champion, and it looks even better if we narrow our view to 21st-century players. Only five of the women ahead of her on the list are active, and four of those are winners of multiple majors–another club that the 21-year-old could join this week. Her semi-final opponent, Karolina Pliskova, executed her own history-making comeback against Serena today. But if Pliskova finds herself down a set to Osaka, even she may not be enough of an escape artist to fight back against the best front-runner in women’s tennis.

Update: Osaka finished off the 2019 Australian Open with two more first-set conversions. In both the semi-final against Pliskova and the final against Kvitova, she won the the first set and went on to win in three. Thus, her streak is up to 61 and she has matched Serena’s best.

Dominating Your Countrymen

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Italian translation at settesei.it

When Andy Murray lost to fellow Brit Kyle Edmund at the 2018 Eastbourne International, The Sunday Times headlined that this was Andy’s first loss to a countryman in twelve years. Indeed, twelve years is a long time, and not too many readers will remember his round of 32 loss against Tim Henman in 2006 at the Thailand Open.

However, if you don’t play often against players from your country, twelve years may feel much shorter. Indeed, between his losses in 2006 and 2018 Andy only played and won four matches against other Britons. From October 2006 to June 2016 there was not even a single match Andy had to play against one of his countrymen. Out of the five matches since his loss in 2006, he won four. Doesn’t look that impressive anymore.

So who are the players that really dominated foes holding the passport? First, let’s look at the longest winning streaks in terms of matches. The list shows players who amassed at least a 10-match winning streak against players from their country, since 1991. Matches that were not completed due to retirements or walkovers are ignored.

Player		Start		End		Matches
Pete Sampras	1993-03		1994-05		34
Pete Sampras	1995-12		1997-02		23
Rafael Nadal	2004-08		2005-10		22
Sergi Bruguera	1993-09		1995-07		20
Rafael Nadal	2008-05		2010-05		19
Sergi Bruguera	1992-04		1993-07		19
Andy Roddick	2006-07		2009-08		18
Guillermo Coria	2002-08		2004-05		18
Stefan Edberg	1991-07		1994-02		18
Andre Agassi	2000-01		2001-08		17
James Blake	2006-02		2007-07		16
Juan C. Ferrero	2002-09		2004-04		16
Rafael Nadal	2012-05		2013-10		15
Carlos Moya	2004-01		2005-01		15
Tomas Berdych	2006-06		2017-01		14*
John Isner	2013-04		2014-07		13
Rafael Nadal	2011-03		2012-04		13
Roger Federer	2009-08		2013-03		13
Andre Agassi	2004-08		2006-03		12
Juan C. Ferrero	2000-02		2001-04		12
Magnus Larsson	1996-04		1999-08		12
Rafael Nadal	2016-02		2018-04		11*
David Ferrer	2011-07		2012-04		11
Novak Djokovic	2008-06		2011-11		11
Andy Roddick	2003-06		2004-03		11
R. Schuettler	2000-08		2003-08		11
Lleyton Hewitt	1999-06		2001-05		11
Y. Kafelnikov	1995-03		2000-10		11
Carlos Costa	1993-07		1994-04		11
Renzo Furlan	1991-03		1994-08		11

* Active streaks of active players

Three players, Pete Sampras, Rafael Nadal and Sergi Bruguera, each with multiple entries, stick out on top of the list. Coming from countries that are known for regularly having players at the top of the rankings, these streaks look even more impressive. Obviously, Pete Sampras, for instance, often got the opportunity to play against other Americans. Hence, when he was at the peak of his career, he could pile up wins for his streak count over a short amount of time–as long as he kept defeating formidable opponents such as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, and Michael Chang.

What if we relax the number of matches contributing to the streak and take a look at the temporal duration of a streak? The list shows all winning streaks against players from the same country lasting 36 months or longer and consisting of four or more matches. The third column shows the duration of the streak in months, the fourth column shows how many matches per month were played during the streak–to give an indication of how regularly the player faced a fellow–and the last column shows how many matches contribute to the streak.

Player		Start		Dur	M/Mon	Matches
Tomas Berdych	2006-06		127	0.11	14*
Jurgen Melzer	2003-07		87	0.07	6
Juan MD Potro	2009-02		85	0.08	7
Thomas Muster	1991-06		83	0.12	10
Tim Henman	1999-03		74	0.09	7
Novak Djokovic	2012-06		70	0.07	5*
Roger Federer	2000-05		69	0.12	8
Milos Raonic	2012-05		69	0.06	4
Y. Kafelnikov	1995-03		67	0.16	11
Lleyton Hewitt	2009-02		65	0.09	6
David Goffin	2012-01		63	0.06	4*
F. Volandri	2003-09		58	0.1	6
Dominik Hrbaty	2000-10		57	0.07	4
Kevin Kim	2000-08		53	0.08	4
Lleyton Hewitt	2001-11		51	0.08	4
Steve Darcis	2008-06		50	0.1	5
A. Chesnokov	1991-04		47	0.11	5
Gustavo Kuerten	1997-04		46	0.11	5
R. Krajicek	1992-06		44	0.23	10
Roger Federer	2009-08		43	0.3	13
Novak Djokovic	2008-06		41	0.27	11
Renzo Furlan	1991-03		41	0.27	11
Magnus Larsson	1996-04		40	0.3	12
Marcos Ondruska	1994-03		40	0.1	4
Andy Roddick	2006-07		36	0.5	18
R. Schuettler	2000-08		36	0.31	11
Tommy Haas	2009-06		36	0.19	7
F. Gonzalez	2006-08		36	0.14	5
H. Zeballos	2014-02		36	0.11	4

* Active streaks of active players

(Andy Murray’s streak is not on this list, because we define the duration of a streak as the time between the first and last match satisfying the condition of the streak, in this case winning matches against countrymen. In his case these dates are June and October 2016 making his streak just short of four months.)

Tomas Berdych comes out on top of the list with a huge gap over the second-place Jurgen Melzer. Berdych’s still active streak of winning against countrymen started more than twelve years ago (the duration of the streak is not exactly that long, because currently the streak stops at his last completed match win which was against Jiri Vesely in January 2017). The streak currently consists of 14 match wins with a relatively low rate of matches per month (0.11).

All of the players who topped the former list don’t qualify for this one, because their streaks, while spanning large numbers of matches, didn’t last as many years as the latter accomplishments. However, two members of the big four, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic appear. The case of Roger Federer is special in that since 2005 out of 26 matches, he only faced two different opponents. Of these 26 matches, he faced Stan Wawrinka 24 times and Marco Chiudinelli twice. His streak starting in 2009 essentially represents his head-to-head against Wawrinka over this period of time. Fun fact: David Goffin is the only player from this list who still has a clean sheet and never lost a match against another Belgian on the ATP tour.

Aside from the current streak of Tomas Berdych, the lack of long active streaks shows us that there are no countries where one player has been dominating everyone else over the past few years. Even the top guys occasionally lose when facing an opponent from the same nation. There’s only one way to reliably avoid losing to a countryman: As Marcos Baghdatis, Grigor Dimitrov, or Kevin Anderson can tell you, the trick is to hail from a nation with no other top-level competition at all.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Big Four Losing Streaks

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Novak Djokovic’s loss against Benoit Paire in his first match at this year’s Miami Masters caused a lot of head scratching. Not only did Benoit equalize his head to head against Novak–next to Hyeon Chung he is now the only active player with a balanced record against Novak; four active players hold positive records–but this was also the Serbian’s third consecutive loss.

Novak immediately made some changes, announcing the end of his partnership with his coach Andre Agassi and part-time coach Radek Stepanek after having worked with them just a few months.

A losing streak of this length by such a dominant player must be rare, and it prompted me to look for similar instances among the big four. The following table shows all three (or more) match losing streaks of the big four after they cracked the top ten in reverse chronological order. The last column shows the Elo-based probability (Prob) of having such a streak. This is simply the product of the probabilities of losing the matches that made up the streak.

Player    Start	        End	Length	Prob
Djokovic  2018-01-15	-*	3	0.002%  (0.027%**)
Murray	  2011-01-17	03-23	4	0.02%
Murray	  2010-03-11	04-11	3	0.63%
Nadal	  2009-11-08	11-22	4	1.89%
Djokovic  2007-10-15	11-12	5	0.07%
Federer	  2002-07-08	08-19	4	0.66%

* Streak still active

** Probability when adjusting Elo ratings due to absence from the tour

The table shows that since August 2002 Roger Federer never lost more than two matches in a row. Even his four match losing streak is the second most likely due to the strong competition he had to face. In November 2009 Rafael Nadal lost four matches in a row, but with a probability far higher than the other streaks. The reason is that three of the four matches occurred at the World Tour Finals, increasing the likelihood of a loss.

A number that stands out is the probability of Novak’s current streak: 0.002%. However, this number is based on traditional Elo ratings which do not take into account player absence, for instance, due to injury. Before this season Novak took a six month break suffering from a shoulder injury.

As has already been discussed, there are ways to adjust Elo ratings for players coming back on the tour. In the case of Maria Sharapova, who stayed absent for 15 months, a 200 point drop in her first five matches after the break was more in line with her level of play than simply assuming that she remained as competitive as before. For this analysis I used a drop of 150 rating points for Novak, which results in a more realistic streak probability of  0.027%, still the second lowest in the list.

This brings us to Andy Murray‘s losing streak of 2011, which most of us probably have already forgotten. After losing the Australian Open final to Novak, Andy lost against Marcos Baghdatis (#20) in Rotterdam, Donald Young (#143) in Indian Wells, and Alex Bogomolov (#118) in Miami. This looks very similar to Novak’s current situation, but Murray bounced back to achieve a 50-9 record for the remainder of the season. It remains to be seen whether Djokovic can do the same.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

ATP Streaks of 2017

Italian translation at settesei.it

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

With the recent update of Jeff’s ATP and WTA GitHub repositories, we can take a look at notable streaks that happened in 2017. In this post I show matches won/lost and tiebreaks won/lost streaks of the 2017 ATP tour.

Let’s start with matches won:

Name               Start   End     Length
Rafael Nadal       04-17   05-15   17
Rafael Nadal       08-28   10-09   16
Roger Federer      06-19   08-07   16
Roger Federer      10-09   11-13   13
Roger Federer      03-06   03-20   12
Alexander Zverev   07-31   08-07   10
Rafael Nadal       05-29   07-03   10
Stan Wawrinka      05-22   05-29   10
Grigor Dimitrov    01-02   01-16   10

We see that, as far as streaks are concerned, the 2017 season was dominated by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Rafa’s streak of 17 wins, which was halted by Dominic Thiem in the Rome quarterfinal, is the only streak containing three back-to-back tournament wins. Besides Roger and Rafa, only Alexander Zverev won two tournaments back-to-back.

When we talk about the less glamorous category of losing streaks, two names immediately should pop into our minds: Vincent Spadea and Donald Young. The former holds the record of 21 consecutive matches lost* on ATP level, and the latter holds one of the longer losing streaks (17 matches lost in a row) in recent years.

During the 2017 ATP season no player came close to any of these marks, but still there were a few moments where players seemed to have forgotten how to win a match. The following list shows all players with 8 or more consecutive matches lost.

Name                  Start   End     Length
Pablo Cuevas          05-29   10-23   10
Maximilian Marterer   02-06   08-28   10
Paolo Lorenzi         08-28   10-30    8 
Malek Jaziri          03-20   07-03    8 
Daniil Medvedev       07-31   10-09    8 
Stefanos Tsitsipas    02-13   10-02    8

Regarding Maximilian Marterer‘s streak of 10 matches lost, we have to mention that he played a good season at the Challenger level. In between his losses at the ATP level there were deep runs at various Challenger tournaments. Still, it must be frustrating to lose your first round main draw match every time after having successfully gone through qualies. This fact accounts for 7 of his 10 losses at ATP main draws (the other 3 coming from entries as a wild card). Pablo Cuevas, the other player having lost 10 matches in a row last season, on the other hand, achieved a real losing streak with no Challenger level wins hidden among them.

Winning tiebreaks has been discussed on this blog a lot. One of the conclusions was that in the past three players–Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and John Isner–consistently outperform their tiebreak expectations. The list of consecutive tiebreaks won in 2017 supports this statement as can be seen in the following table.

Name           Start   End     Length
John Isner     05-15   05-29   11   
Roger Federer  06-19   08-07   8 
Roger Federer  03-06   03-20   8 
(Many tied)                    7

John Isner’s streak went over the course of 8 matches including 2 matches he lost, whereas Roger won all the matches in which he won the tiebreaks contributing to his streaks.

The list of consecutive tiebreaks lost looks as follows.

Name            Start   End     Length
Lucas Pouille   07-03   10-09   12 
Florian Mayer   01-02   07-03   11
Dusan Lajovic   03-06   07-24   8

Lucas Pouille holds the crown for most tiebreaks lost in a row in 2017. In fact he got really close to Robin Haase‘s infamous run of 13 tiebreaks lost.

Finally, I want to present an odd 2017 achievement by Nick Kyrgios: He is the only player ever to lose three matches in a row by retirement.

Date   Tourney   Matchup                           Result
07-31  W'ington  Nick Kyrgios vs Tennys Sandgren   3-6 0-3 RET
07-03  Wimby     Nick Kyrgios vs Pierre H Herbert  3-6 4-6 RET
06-19  London    Nick Kyrgios vs Donald Young      6-7(3) 0-0 RET

The list of 2018 streaks is shaping up nicely already: Doubles partners Oliver Marach and Mate Pavic opened their season with 17 straight wins, including three titles, finally ending with a loss in the Rotterdam final to Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut. Marach can even claim an 18-match streak, since he won a Davis Cup match for Austria last month while pairing with Philipp Oswald. Doubles data is tougher to come by, but it’s safe to say that the season-opening run for Marach/Pavic will have a prominent place in any summaries of this year’s ATP streaks.

 

* The list excludes one loss of Vincent Spadea at the 1999 World Team Cup in Düsseldorf, where he lost to Rainer Schüttler 5-7, 6-3, 1-6.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

Dominic Thiem played Davis Cup in Barcelona. Sort of…

This is a guest post by Peter Wetz.

Last week Dominic Thiem fought his way into the finals of the Barcelona Open by winning against Kyle Edmund, Daniel Evans, Yuichi Sugita, and Andy Murray. Three of these four players play for the same flag and Thiem won against each of them. Thiem is not exactly a champion of the current Davis Cup format–he has opted out of playing for Austria several times and has a rather poor record of 2-3 when he does compete–but in Barcelona he has, at least, shown that he can beat several players from the same country over a short amount of time. And that’s what Davis Cup is about, right?

In this post my goal is to put this statistical hiccup into some context. It is not the first time the Austrian defeated three players of the same nationality at one event: In 2016 at Buenos Aires Thiem already beat three players from Spain. However, given that Spanish players appear much more frequently in draws than Britons do, I will take a closer look.

Since 1990, there have only been three tournaments where a single player faced three players from Great Britain. And only one of these players who faced three Britons won each encounter. The following table shows the three tournaments and each of the matches where a player from Great Britain was faced by the same player. Wally Masur is the only player since 1990 who defeated three players from Great Britain in a single tournament. Thiem remains the only player who achieved this in a tournament outside of the island.

Tournament     Round Winner        Loser           Score
'93 Manchester R32   Wally Masur   Ross Matheson   6-4 6-4
'93 Manchester R16   Wally Masur   Chris Wilkinson 6-3 6-7(4) 6-3
'93 Manchester QF    Wally Masur   Jeremy Bates    6-4 6-3

'97 Nottingham R32   Karol Kucera  Martin Lee      6-1 6-1
'97 Nottingham SF    Karol Kucera  Tim Henman      6-4 2-6 6-4
'97 Nottingham F     Greg Rusedski Karol Kucera    6-4 7-5

'01 Nottingham R32   Martin Lee    Lee Childs      6-4 5-7 6-0
'01 Nottingham R16   Martin Lee    Arvind Parmar   6-4 6-3
'01 Nottingham QF    Greg Rusedski Martin Lee      6-3 6-2

Obviously, there are not many chances to face three Britons in a single tournament. And when one of those opponents is likely to be Andy Murray, a player’s chances of beating all three are even slimmer.

Let’s broaden the perspective a bit and take a look at how often a player defeated three (or more) players from the same country without looking only at Great Britain. The following table displays the results of this analysis. The first column contains the country, the second column (3W) shows how often a player defeated three players of this country, the third column (3WL) shows how often a player defeated two players of this country and then lost to a player of the same country, and so on.

Country  3W  3WL  4W  4WL  5W  5WL
USA      119 179  19  30   1   4
ESP      98  157  17  18   3   2
FRA      28  45   5   2    1   0
ARG      22  26   5   3    0   0
GER      15  18   1   1    0   0
AUS      13  9    0   0    0   0
SWE      9   16   1   0    0   0
CZE      4   5    0   0    0   0
NED      4   4    0   0    0   0
RUS      4   3    0   0    0   0
ITA      2   3    1   0    0   0
BRA      1   3    1   0    0   0
GBR      1   2    0   0    0   0
CHI      1   1    0   0    0   0
SUI      1   1    0   0    0   0

As we could have imagined, USA, ESP, and FRA come out on top here, simply, because for years they have had the highest density of players in the rankings. These are also the only countries of which a player was faced five times at a single tournament. Facing a player of the same country six or more times never happened according to the data at hand. The following table shows the most recent occasions of the entries printed in bold in the above table (5W).

Tournament    Round Winner        Loser             Score
'91 Charlotte R32   Jaime Yzaga   Chris Garner      7-6 6-3
'91 Charlotte R16   Jaime Yzaga   Jimmy Brown       6-4 6-4
'91 Charlotte QF    Jaime Yzaga   Michael Chang     7-6 6-1
'91 Charlotte SF    Jaime Yzaga   M. Washington     7-5 6-2
'91 Charlotte F     Jaime Yzaga   Jimmy Arias       6-3 7-5
                                                 
'07 Lyon      R32   Sebastien Gr. Rodolphe Cadart   6-3 6-2
'07 Lyon      R16   Sebastien Gr. Fabrice Santoro   4-6 6-1 6-2
'07 Lyon      QF    Sebastien Gr. Julien Benneteau  6-7 6-2 7-6
'07 Lyon      SF    Sebastien Gr. Jo Tsonga         6-1 6-2
'07 Lyon      F     Sebastien Gr. Marc Gicquel      7-6 6-4
                                                  
'08 Valencia  R32   David Ferrer  Ivan Navarro      6-3 6-4
'08 Valencia  R16   David Ferrer  Pablo Andujar     6-3 6-4
'08 Valencia  QF    David Ferrer  Fernando Verdasco 6-3 1-6 7-5
'08 Valencia  SF    David Ferrer  Tommy Robredo     2-6 6-2 6-3
'08 Valencia  F     David Ferrer  Nicolas Almagro   4-6 6-2 7-6

Finally, we take a look at the big four. Did they ever eliminate three or more players from the same country in a single tournament? Yes, they did. In 2014 Roger Federer beat three Czech players in Dubai. In 2005, 2008, and 2013 he beat three German players in Halle. In 2009 Andy Murray beat three Spanish players in Valencia. In 2007 Novak Djokovic beat three Spanish players in Estoril. In 2013 Rafael Nadal beat three Argentinian players both in Acapulco and Sao Paolo. In 2015 he even beat four Argentinian players in Buenos Aires. And there are many other examples where Rafa beat three of his countrymen at the same tournament.

We can see that this happens fairly often, specifically for countries where the tournament is organized, because more players of this country appear in the draw due to wild cards and qualifications. If we exclude these cases, Federer’s streak in Dubai stands out, as does Thiem’s streak in Barcelona.

—

Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.

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.