Last week, Tsvetana Pironkova dealt Aryna Sabalenka a rough start to her Miami campaign: a 6-0 first set. It took two more hours and a third-set tiebreak to settle the issue, but ultimately Sabalenka came back, shrugging off the abysmal opening frame.
It’s not the first time Sabalenka has completed such a comeback. In 2018, she overcame a bagel opener at the hands of Marketa Vondrousova at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and famously, she recovered after losing the first 10 games in Ostrava last fall to Sara Sorribes Tormo. She didn’t just claw her way back against the Spaniard, she won the next 12 in a row–not to mention her next 13 matches after that.
Remarkably, these three matches are the only times Sabalenka has lost a first-set bagel at tour level. She’s won them all.
Context, please
Three-set comebacks are common in women’s tennis, but as you might guess, they are less common when the first set is a lopsided one. A 6-0 or 6-1 opener suggests either that the players are mismatched, or one of the competitors is having a particularly good or bad day.
Approximately one-third of matches go to a third set, and about one in six end up in favor of the woman who lost the first one. But when the opening frame is a bagel, those numbers are roughly halved–more than four in five of the matches are put away in straights, and fewer than 8% of the 0-6 losers complete the comeback.
Here are the numbers for every opening set score, drawing on all WTA tour-level matches since 2000:
All else equal, losers of close first sets have a much better chance at coming back than those who drop lopsided openers.
About those 7.5%
All else is never equal, so it isn’t right to say that Sabalenka had a one-in-thirteen chance of coming back against Sorribes Tormo or Pironkova. A top player who loses an opening set is much more likely to bounce back than, say, Renata Zarazua, the qualifier who lost 6-0 6-0 to Angelique Kerber the same day as Aryna’s latest exploit. Zarazua isn’t that bad, but the odds she’d win the last two sets were much worse than Sabalenka’s.
Yet in the 2000s, no one has done what the Belarussian has, winning all of the matches in which she loses a love-six opening set. She’s three-for-three, and no one else is even two-for-two at tour level.
Sabalenka has a ways to go to catch Klara Koukalova, who came back from a first-set bagel six times, more than anyone else on tour this century. It took her 24 tries, which still works out to an impressive conversion rate of 25%. By contrast, Sorana Cirstea has been first-set-bageled 19 times, and has yet to turn any of them around.
There are more meaningful aspects of Sabalenka’s powerful and entertaining game, but at the moment, her perfect record after love-six openers is my favorite.
In their third round match today at the Australian Open, Sara Errani and Su Wei Hsieh played 232 points. The fastest serve either one hit registered at 93 mph (149 kmh), Hsieh’s first serves averaged 85 mph, and Errani’s mean first serve speed was 75 mph. I use the word “mean” here as more than just a way to avoid saying “average” so many times.
The two veterans are crafty–dare I say tricky–players with an arsenal of weapons once the ball is in play. But the serve is mostly just a stumbling block to make the best of. Hsieh won 62 of her 115 return points, good for 54% of Errani’s serves. This is more impressive than it sounds–the Italian double faulted only four times today. It’s fairly common for a winner on the women’s tour to win more than half of her return points, but what makes this match so weird is that Errani did the same. She won 63 of her 117 return points, also a 54% clip.
About half of WTA losers fail to convert better than 50% of their service points. But only 2.4% of winners miss the mark. And there’s a huge gap between 50%–mediocre and survivable–and Hsieh’s 46%. A 46% rate of service points won translates to a 40% likelihood of holding. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what both players did, each hanging on to their service games in 6 of 15 tries.
I have the relevant stats for just under 25,000 tour-level, main draw women’s matches since 2010, and only about 80 winners–0.3%, or less than once per 300 contests–won service points at a lower clip than Hsieh did today.
** I say “about” because the stats I have from the early 2010s aren’t perfect. A match with 60% of return points won is a prime candidate to be a mistake. I checked these 80 for obvious errors, like matches with a small number of service breaks, but those numbers aren’t perfect either.
There’s no grand analytical insight to be gleaned from a match like this. It’s just a glorious oddity that reminds us how many different ways there are to win matches. (And to be honest, you only need to watch Hsieh for about 90 seconds to recognize that.) In that spirit, here’s some more trivia:
Since 2010, this is only the 12th Australian Open main draw match in which neither player won half of her service points.
The only AO match in which neither player won 46% of their service points was the 2018 third-rounder between Anett Kontaveit and Jelena Ostapenko. They both held about 45.5% of their points, and 68% of total games (17 of 25) were breaks.
There have been about 400 tour-level matches since 2010 in which neither player wins half of their service points. Before today, 21 of those involved Errani, and she won 17 of them.
The other players who have been involved in at least 12 such matches are Monica Niculescu (16), Alize Cornet (14), and Carla Suarez Navarro (13). Today was only Hsieh’s 5th appearance on the list.
Perhaps oddest of all, this the first time in four tries that Hsieh avoiding getting bageled by Errani. Last time they played, in Istanbul in 2017, the Italian won, 6-0 6-1, needing only 55 minutes and a total of 87 points. Errani was so on-form that day that she won a whopping 66% of her service points. Hsieh finally turned the tables, even if she still hasn’t figured out how to stop this dogged opponent from breaking her serve.
Not every double bagel is created equal. Today in Melbourne, Ashleigh Barty beat Danka Kovinic without losing a game, dropping only ten points. By contrast, a memorable Stuttgart first-rounder from 2015 saw Sabine Lisicki lose 6-0 6-0 to Zarina Diyas, requiring 88 points and well over an hour to play. Lisicki won 37.5% of total points played that day, while Kovinic snuck off with just 16.7%.
Barty’s performance was among the most dominant in recent WTA history. I have mostly complete match stats for the women’s tour going back to about 2010, and in that time frame, only two main draw double bagels have finished in fewer than 60 points:
Points Year Event Round Winner Loser
57 2017 Hua Hin R32 Golubic Wisitwarapron
59 2019 New Haven R32 Cepelova Small
60 2021 Aus Open R128 Barty Kovinic
60 2019 Madrid R16 Halep Kuzmova
61 2010 Estoril R32 Garrigues De Lattre
62 2017 Bol R32 Mrdeza Thombare
63 2013 Aus Open R64 Sharapova Doi
63 2015 Bastad R16 Barthel Zanevska
64 2015 Toronto R64 Vinci Knapp
64 2017 Tokyo R32 Krunic Date
64 2011 Luxembourg R32 Garrigues Kremer
64 2012 Copenhagen R32 Cornet Ejdesgaard
65 2010 Moscow R16 Kirilenko Bondarenko
Today’s drubbing is even a bit more impressive than it looks on that list. Barty lost only 10 points–among the matches listed above, that’s equal to Jana Cepelova, two more than Viktorija Golubic, and fewer than everyone else. Not all 60-pointers are identical: Because Kovinic forced one deuce game today, Barty had to win 50 points instead of the minimum 48. Simona Halep only needed 48 in her 2019 Madrid double bagel, meaning that she lost 12 of the 60 points played that day.
Double bagel probability
There’s a bit of luck involved in winning twelve games in a row, even for a player at the top of her game. Kovinic won 10 points today, so even if she did exactly the same thing in her next match, one can imagine her “bunching” her points differently and putting a game or two on the board. Unlikely, but possible.
For any match, we can take the winner’s rate of service points won and return points won, and then generate the probability that she wins twelve games in a row. I did this exact exercise last January during the ATP Cup when Roberto Bautista Agut handed a 6-0 6-0 loss to Aleksandre Metreveli. Metreveli lasted 97 points, or 61% longer than Kovinic. If Metreveli had continued to play at that level, his chances of losing twelve games in a row would have been a mere 14.8%.
Barty won 88.9% of her service points and 78.8% of her return points against Kovinic today. If she continued at those rates, assuming no unusual streakiness or significantly better or worse performance at certain point scores, she would hold serve 99.8% of the time and break in 97.2% of return games. (By contrast, Bautista Agut’s probabilities were “only” 98.9% and 73.6%.)
The likelihood of a 6-0 6-0 bagel is simply that of six holds and six breaks. For Barty: (99.8% ^ 6) * (97.2% ^ 6), or 83.6%. In other words, the way she was playing today, Ash would score the double bagel five out of six times.
This probability is the number that really tells you how dominant a player was, even if it’s a few levels more complex than counting points and points lost. And by this measure, only Golubic’s great day holds a place on the list ahead of Barty’s. The p(DB) column shows the probability of a double bagel.
p(DB) Year Event Round Winner Loser
88.7% 2017 Hua Hin R32 Golubic Wisitwarapron
83.6% 2021 Aus Open R128 Barty Kovinic
80.0% 2019 New Haven R32 Cepelova Small
76.8% 2019 Madrid R16 Halep Kuzmova
75.4% 2017 Tokyo R32 Krunic Date
68.8% 2011 Luxembourg R32 Garrigues Kremer
66.9% 2010 Estoril R32 Garrigues De Lattre
64.9% 2017 Bastad R32 Krejcikova Beck
64.1% 2017 Bol R32 Mrdeza Thombare
62.0% 2010 Moscow R16 Kirilenko Bondarenko
60.7% 2016 US Open R128 Suarez Navarro Pereira
59.2% 2013 Aus Open R64 Sharapova Doi
59.2% 2018 US Open R128 Gavrilova Sorribes Tormo
Gotta love the coincidence here. 13th on this list is a 2018 US Open first-rounder between Daria Gavrilova and Sara Sorribes Tormo. Both players are still going strong (except when Sorribes Tormo was up 6-0 4-0 on Aryna Sabalenka in Ostrava last October), both are in Melbourne, and they drew each other again this week. Gavrilova won again, though not quite as easily. Her reward? A second-round match on Thursday with Ashleigh Barty.
With all the drama in the tennis world right now–paradoxically despite the lack of official match results–a dry analytical article might be just what you need. And what better opportunity than quarantine to work through my long list of articles to write?
In June 2019, Feliciano Lopez had to complete five matches in two days. Not because he had to hop between tournaments as a 22-year-old Jo-Wilfried Tsonga did in 2007, but because Lopez went deep into both the singles and doubles draws on the grass courts at Queen’s Club, ultimately winning both titles.
Lopez won all four of his singles matches in the deciding set, and there was not much time to celebrate and recover after the final, because the doubles title match awaited. Partnering a rehabilitating Andy Murray seems to have been a sensible decision based on the fact that Murray’s most lopsided head-to-head of 11-0 is against Lopez. By doing so, Lopez could be guaranteed to avoid facing Murray in the doubles draw. An unusual strategy–and probably not his top consideration in choosing a partner–but it worked.
Lifting two trophies on finals day happens quite often at the Challenger tour, but is unusual on the main tour, where the best singles players often skip the doubles draw entirely. But how rare is it? And has it changed over the years? Longtime fans will immediately think of John McEnroe and his nearly equal tally of doubles titles (78) and singles titles (77). The modest title counts of Roger Federer (6) and Rafael Nadal (11) pale in comparison, even though the Spaniard is an exceptional doubles player.
Let’s take a look at the instances when a player won both trophies at the same tournament since 2005.
Year Tournament Player (Partner)
2005 Dusseldorf Tommy Haas (Alexander Waske)
2005 Halle Roger Federer (Yves Allegro)
2005 Basel Fernando Gonzalez (Agustin Calleri)
2006 Vina del Mar Jose Acasuso (Sebastian Prieto)
2007 Chennai Xavier Malisse (Dick Norman)
2007 Delray Beach Xavier Malisse (Hugo Armando)
2007 Munich Philipp Kohlschreiber (Mikhail Youzhny)
2007 Dusseldorf Agustin Calleri (Juan Ignacio Chela)
2008 Monte Carlo Rafael Nadal (Tommy Robredo)
2008 Dusseldorf Robin Soderling (Robert Lindstedt)
2009 Costa Do Sauipe Tommy Robredo (Marcel Granollers)
2009 San Jose Radek Stepanek (Tommy Haas)
2009 Newport Rajeev Ram (Jordan Kerr)
2010 Memphis Sam Querrey (John Isner)
2010 Marseille Michael Llodra (Julien Benneteau)
2010 Bucharest Juan Ignacio Chela (Lukasz Kubot)
2011 Tokyo Andy Murray (Jamie Murray)
2012 Zagreb Mikhail Youzhny (Marcos Baghdatis)
2013 Newport Nicolas Mahut (Edouard Roger Vasselin)
2014 Newport Lleyton Hewitt (Chris Guccione)
2017 Montpellier Alexander Zverev (Mischa Zverev)
2018 Gstaad Matteo Berrettini (Daniele Bracciali)
2019 London Feliciano Lopez (Andy Murray)
Two things may catch one’s eye when looking at the list: First, since 2011 the double-title feat occurred slightly less than once per year. But before that it happened several times a year with the sole exception of 2006. Second, the only player who managed to win both titles at a Masters event is Nadal at Monte Carlo in 2008.
It is obvious, and a frequent topic of tennis hipster talk, that top singles players do not care as much about doubles anymore, certainly not as much as McEnroe and his peers did. One line of argument is that the way that modern doubles tennis has evolved to become more and more different from the singles game. In order to keep up with that, singles players would need to adapt their practice routine, which might detract from potential singles success. Long story short, the argument is that doubles became too “difficult” for singles players.
But let’s look at the numbers. The following graphs show the composition of draws since the year 2000. We see the percentage of players in singles draws, who also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament for three different categories (A = All, M = Masters, G = Grand Slams). The first graph shows the numbers for top 50 singles players and the second graph for top 10 singles players.
Percentage of top 50 players entering doubles draws per 5 yearsPercentage of top 10 players entering doubles draws per 5 years
The first graph is not very dramatic, but it establishes that the habits of top 50 singles players have been quite steady over the past 20 years among all tournament categories. Since the year 2000, irrespective of event categories, between 41 and 47 percent of top 50 players entering a singles draw also entered the doubles draw of the same tournament.*
The second graph shows us that the numbers for top 10 players are a different story entirely. Ignoring tournament categories, the number of top 10 players participating in doubles draws has plummeted from 35 to 22 percent. While the numbers also decreased if we only look at Masters tournaments, it is interesting that it remains higher than the overall number. This can likely be explained by the fact that the prize money for doubles at Masters events is significantly higher than at regular tour events. Often the organizers of these tournaments also have the financial power to persuade top players to play doubles in order to–I am hypothesizing here–increase ticket sales or attendance in the early days of a tournament. See the Indian Wells Masters for instance, which is known for its stellar doubles draw every year.
The most drastic decline in doubles attendance by top 10 singles players can be seen at the Grand Slams, however. While in the period between the years 2000 and 2004 every fifth singles player took part in the doubles, in the past five years only one out of 183 singles entries also appeared in the doubles draw. The sole exception (of course!) was Dominic Thiem, who entered the 2016 US Open doubles competition ranked number 10 in singles with his countryman Tristan Samuel Weissborn.
As with many analyses it is difficult to provide a definitive answer to the question at hand. But the numbers help us to see the size of the effects and theorize about its causes. That doubles competition has become more and more specialized certainly has its validity. At the same time, the numbers also suggest that top singles players simply optimize for prize money, which means focusing on singles, not doubles. If there was a McEnroe-esque player on tour today (as Rafa might be), he just wouldn’t play enough doubles to win nearly 80 titles.
However, it is hard to tell which was first: The decline of singles players playing doubles due to reasons such as financial motivation (among possibly many others), or the players’ realization that they simply cannot keep up with the elite doubles competition? One thing may be for sure though: Had TennisTV already existed a few decades ago, it would have shown a lot more doubles than it does now.
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* Note that there is the possibility that a few singles players might have been willing to enter the doubles draw of a tournament, but couldn’t, because their ranking was too low among other reasons. However, I think this affects the analysis only marginally, if at all.
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Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.
Roberto Bautista Agut got his 2020 season off to a roaring start on Saturday at the ATP Cup, knocking out the No. 2 Georgian player, Aleksandre Metreveli, by the embarrassing score of 6-0 6-0. Double bagels are extremely rare on the men’s tour, with fewer than 100 recorded in the last three decades.
About one-quarter of those 6-0 6-0 results have come in Davis Cup, the most likely venue for such an uneven matchup. Davis Cup’s reverse singles, the (largely defunct) part of the competition that pits each side’s top player against the other’s second-best, generates particularly lopsided outcomes. The ATP Cup doesn’t have that, but Bautista Agut is better than many national number ones, and Metreveli is one of the handful of competitors in Australia this week who would never otherwise feature in a tour-level event.
Still, it wasn’t quite as lopsided as all that.
The match lasted 72 minutes, longer than any of the 59 ATP double bagels for which I have match stats. It was only the fourth 6-0 6-0 result to reach the one-hour mark. The previous longest double bagel was a 65-minute contest at the 2005 Rome Masters in which Guillermo Canas battered Juan Monaco. Of the 120 women’s tour-level double bagels for which I have stats, none exceeded 67 minutes.
Counting stats
Match times can be affected by player tics and crowd conditions, but the number of points played cannot. By that measure as well, Metreveli was better than his scoreline. He kept the Spaniard on court for 97 points, longer than all but three of the previous ATP double bagels. The average 6-0 6-0 men’s match lasts only 74 points. Over 150 tour-level matches last year required 97 or fewer points, including several finals and a couple of contests that included a 7-5 set.
Another way to look at the closeness of the match is to consider break points saved. The score requires that Metreveli didn’t break serve, and that Bautista Agut did so six times. But the Georgian fought hard against the Spaniard’s return assault, saving eight break points. Only four of the 59 previous double-bagel losers withstood so many break attempts.
Double bagel chances
Bautista Agut won 83% of his service points, and Metreveli won only 40%. If those rates continued without any unusual streaks of points won or lost, that would translate to a 98.9% hold percentage for the Spaniard and a 26.4% hold percentage for the Georgian. To win all twelve games, RBA needed to hold six times and break six times. Based on these hold rates, his chances of doing so were 14.8%.
Put another way, if these two players kept playing at the same levels for a large number of matches (sorry, Aleksandre!), the score would be 6-0 6-0 only about one match out of six.
Once again, Metreveli’s performance stands out as one of the strongest to result in a double bagel. Only five of the previous 59 drubbings had such a low probability of turning out 6-0 6-0. Measured by double-bagel probability, eight matches from the 2019 season were more lopsided than this one, and only one of them ended in twelve straight games. Three of the losers managed to avoid any bagels at all:
Event Winner Loser Score DB Prob
Winston Salem Fratangelo Weintraub 6-0 6-0 63.5%
Los Cabos Granollers Gomez 6-0 6-1 24.6%
Us Open Federer Goffin 6-2 6-2 6-0 19.9%
Estoril Dav. Fokina Chardy 6-1 6-2 18.5%
Acapulco Millman Gojowczyk 6-0 6-2 17.2%
Rome Nadal Basilashvili 6-1 6-0 16.6%
Miami Car. Baena Kudla 6-1 6-2 16.6%
Tokyo Djokovic Pouille 6-1 6-2 15.5%
(Yes, Metreveli fared better against RBA than Basilashvili did against Nadal last May! The Basilashvili-Nadal rematch on Saturday was a bit closer, though.)
None of this is to say that Metreveli had a good day in his ATP Cup debut. However, double bagels are so rare that they tend to grab the headlines, pushing the details to the side. Given how the Georgian played in his ATP Cup debut, he deserved a more pedestrian loss with at least a game or two in the win column.
Last night in Toronto, 91st-ranked qualifier Marie Bouzkova won her quarter-final match against 4th-ranked Simona Halep. Halep retired with a leg injury after losing the first set, so there’s a caveat–even if we were prepared to read too much into a single match, we wouldn’t attribute a lot of meaning to this one. But it’s a big accomplishment for the 21-year-old Czech, who earned her second top-ten scalp of the week and will advance to her first Premier-level semi-final, against no less of an obstacle than Serena Williams.
Here’s the nutty thing: It was Bouzkova’s 62nd match of the 2019 season, her 61st against someone with a WTA ranking. She got the win against the highest-ranked foe–Halep–but just last week, she lost to 636th-ranked CoCo Vandeweghe, her lowest-ranked opponent of the year. Yeah, the caveats keep coming: Vandeweghe is coming back from injury and is surely better than a ranking outside the top 600, and the ITF Transition Tour hijinks mean that the ranking system didn’t work as usual in 2019. Some players who would normally have a very low ranking, like the Kazakh wild card who Bouzkova crushed a couple of weeks ago, don’t count.
Still. 61 matches, with a win against the highest-ranked player and a loss against the lowest.
That sent me to my database, which had plenty more surprises in store. Going back less than a decade, to 2010, I found 127 players who recorded the same oddball combination of feats in a single season, minimum 30 matches. (To be consistent with the Halep result, I included retirements if at least one set was completed.) While many of the players won’t be of wide interest–last year, one of the exemplars was Mira Antonitsch, who didn’t play anyone ranked in the top 400–63 of the 127 player-seasons involved beating a top-100 opponent, 44 included the defeat of someone in the top 50, and 25 were highlighted by a top-ten upset.
Three of them included Halep as the top-ten scalp! That makes Bouzkova the fourth player to beat Halep, not face anyone higher ranked, and also lose to her lowest-ranked opponent of the season. (Through eight months, anyway.) Halep shouldn’t feel too bad, though, as Angelique Kerber has been the extreme-ranked loser in five such cases, four of them in 2017. Ouch.
Here are the 25 player-seasons between 2010 and 2018 in which a WTAer beat her highest-ranked opponent and lost to her lowest:
A quick glance is all it takes to establish that Vandeweghe isn’t the first lowest-ranked player to inspire a “yeah, but” reaction. The list of purportedly weak opponents is very strong for one made up of players with an average ranking outside of the top 500. We have stars such as Victoria Azarenka (twice) and Serena as well as a helping of prospects such as Bianca Andreescu and Victoria Duval.
Consider this as today’s reminder of the limitations of the WTA computer rankings. They tell us who has won a lot of matches in the last 52 weeks, not necessarily who is playing well right now. These cases include many of the most extreme mismatches between official ranking and on-the-day ability. I don’t think it says anything meaningful about a player to show up on this list–though Kerber’s many appearances (as both player and scalp!) are a good summary of her disappointing 2017 campaign.
Bouzkova will remain on the list for at least a couple more days: Serena is currently ranked 10th and both of the other semi-finalists are ranked lower, so Halep will remain her “toughest” opponent. Despite the Czech’s breakout week, it would be understandable if she found herself overawed to face a 23-time slam champion across the net. But one thing is certain: Bouzkova couldn’t care less about the number next to the name.
In today’s third-round match in Rome, Roger Federer posted a truly unusual stat line. He beat Borna Coric in three sets, 2-6 6-4 7-6(7), winning 95 points to Coric’s 107. That’s a total-points-won rate (TPW) 47.0%, not unheard of for a match winner, but near the lower limit of what’s possible. By Dominance Ratio (DR)–the ratio of return points won to serve points lost–Fed comes out at 0.78, where 1.0 represents an evenly-split match. He has won only 24 times in his career with a DR below 1.0, and today was the first time since 2015. These types of decisions are often referred to as “lottery matches,” because there is more luck than usual involved in the result.
Not only did Federer win the match with a TPW below 50% and a DR below 1.0, all three of his individual sets were below those numbers. He won 23 of 55 points in the first set, 31 of 64 in the second, and 41 of 83 in the third. The low total in the first set is to be expected–he lost that set badly. But often, low numbers for an entire match stem from a bad performance in a single set, like the swoon in a 7-6 1-6 7-6 contest. Coric outplayed him–narrowly, at least–in all three sets.
You might suspect that this is extremely rare, and you’d be right. Only 4.5% of ATP tour-level matches end in favor of the player who won fewer points, and 7.2% go the direction of a player with a DR below 1.0. Those numbers usually overlap, but not always. Roughly 4.0% of matches are won by a player with a TPW below 50% and a DR below 1.0. Individual sets are even more likely to be awarded to the player who won more points. Just 2.4% of sets are won by the man who lost more points. The frequency of DR < 1.0 is 7.4%, about the same as at the match level.
It turns out that there is a precedent–exactly one!–for Fed’s feat, of winning a match with TPW < 50% and DR < 1.0 in each of three sets. That’s one previous occurence in my dataset of point-by-point sequences for over 17,000 ATP tour-level matches since 2010. Inevitably, John Isner was involved. At Memphis in 2017, Isner lost his quarter-final match to Donald Young, 7-6 3-6 7-6. Young won only 46.9% of total points, and his DR was 0.66, both marks among the lowest you’ll ever see for a winner. Like Federer, Young came close in the sets he won, tallying 49.3% of all points in both the first and third set. By saving eight of nine break points and withstanding the Isner serve in the tiebreaks, Young managed to overcome a statistically superior opponent.
Federer’s victory today wasn’t particularly reliant on break point performance, though fans will be encouraged that he converted two of his four opportunities. Much has been written about Roger’s ineffectiveness in this sort of match–against his 24 wins with a sub-1.0 DR, he has 49 losses with a DR above 1.0–and break point futility is often to blame. While big servers tend to play a lot of close matches, Federer has managed to record plenty of wins without relying on the lucky ones.
With a guaranteed place in the prominent parts of the record book, Fed is making a move on the obscure pages in the back. Having repeatedly shown us that he can win matches by outplaying the guy on the other side of the net, he finally came up with a victory when the stats pointed in the other direction.
Three weeks ago, Jürgen Melzer played his last singles tournament on home turf at the Erste Bank Open in Vienna. His low singles ranking, caused by injury setbacks and a mediocre comeback campaign, required him to enter into the tournament as a wild card. Melzer drew Milos Raonic in the first round; bookmakers and fans alike predicted that this would be Melzer’s last singles match.
However, things went differently. In front of a packed arena (at least by tournament-Monday standards) Melzer squeezed out a two set win to face Kevin Anderson in the round of 16. That match never happened, though, after a suddenly occurring gastritis forced him to withdraw. As weird as it sounds, this means that Melzer did not lose the last match of his singles career, a feat only a few players can put on their CV.
Another unique thing about Melzer is that he is one of the last players to reach an elite level in singles as well as in doubles. To underline this characteristic let’s start by looking at singles (ChS) and doubles (ChD) career high rankings of recently-retired1 top ten singles players. The following table shows each player’s peak singles and doubles rankings, sorted by the date at which each player recorded their best singles ranking:
Player ChS ChS Date ChD ChD Date
Paradorn Srichaphan 9 2003-05 79 2003-09
Juan Carlos Ferrero 1 2003-09 198 2003-02
Andy Roddick 1 2003-11 50 2010-01
Rainer Schuettler 5 2004-04 40 2005-07
Guillermo Coria 3 2004-05 183 2004-03
Nicolas Massu 9 2004-09 31 2005-07
Joachim Johansson 9 2005-02 108 2005-09
Gaston Gaudio 5 2005-04 78 2004-06
Guillermo Canas 8 2005-06 47 2002-07
Mariano Puerta 9 2005-08 68 1999-08
David Nalbandian 3 2006-03 105 2009-10
Ivan Ljubicic 3 2006-05 70 2005-05
Mario Ancic 7 2006-07 47 2004-06
Radek Stepanek 8 2006-07 4 2012-11
Nikolay Davydenko 3 2006-11 31 2005-06
James Blake 4 2006-11 31 2003-03
Fernando Gonzalez 5 2007-01 25 2005-07
Robin Soderling 4 2010-11 109 2009-05
Jürgen Melzer 8 2011-04 6 2010-10
Nicolas Almagro 9 2011-05 48 2011-03
Mardy Fish 7 2011-08 14 2009-07
Janko Tipsarevic 8 2012-04 46 2011-04
Juan Monaco 10 2012-07 41 2009-01
The data shows that top ten singles players rarely climb up to the very top in doubles. Of course, there can be several reasons for this: scheduling (playing a full singles schedule can be exhausting) or skill (being a good singles player doesn’t necessarily mean that you are also a good doubles player), among others. The fact that the best doubles career high ranking by the Big Four is Roger Federer’s rank of 24 reached in 2003 further underlines that top singles players have better things to do than practicing their volleying skills.
So, as the table above already suggests, Melzer is one of the last of the breed of players that–ranking-wise–made it until the very top in both singles and doubles. The following table shows players who reached a top-ten career high in both rankings, sorted by when they achieved their high in doubles back until 1990.
Player ChS ChS Date ChD ChD Date
Petr Korda 2 1998-02 10 1990-06
Michael Stich 2 1993-11 9 1991-03
Marc Rosset 9 1995-09 8 1992-11
Yevgeny Kafelnikov 1 1999-05 4 1998-03
Patrick Rafter 1 1999-07 6 1999-02
Wayne Ferreira 6 1995-05 9 2001-03
Jiri Novak 5 2002-10 6 2001-07
Jonas Björkman 4 1997-11 1 2001-07
Arnaud Clement 10 2001-04 8 2008-01
Jürgen Melzer 8 2011-04 6 2010-10
Radek Stepanek 8 2006-07 4 2012-11
Fernando Verdasco* 7 2009-04 8 2013-11
Jack Sock* 8 2017-11 2 2018-09
* Active singles player
Since 1990 there have only been 13 players who reached a doubles and singles career high inside the top ten. The last number one with a top ten doubles ranking was Patrick Rafter. Currently there are only two active singles players part of this group. As has already been mentioned on this blog severaltimes, Jack Sock’s doubles prowess is an exception no matter how you look at it. And the time between Fernando Verdasco’s singles high and doubles high shows that he reached them at two completely different stages of his career, which brings us to the final measure: Which players held a top ten spot in both rankings at the same time? The following table shows players, weeks spent in the singles top ten (weeksS), weeks spent in the doubles top ten (weeksD) and weeks spent in both singles and doubles top ten at the same time (weeksS+D) sorted by the date the doubles career high was reached.
Player weeksS weeksD weeksS+D Chd Date
John Mcenroe 208 96 74 1983-01
Pat Cash 89 14 5 1984-08
Anders Jarryd 82 379 78 1985-08
Mats Wilander 227 72 72 1985-10
Stefan Edberg 452 122 117 1986-06
Guy Forget 79 119 5 1986-08
Yannick Noah 157 87 84 1986-08
Andres Gomez 143 62 31 1986-09
Boris Becker 530 21 21 1986-09
Joakim Nystrom 72 57 33 1986-11
Miloslav Mecir 109 19 19 1988-03
Emilio Sanchez 57 138 44 1989-04
Jakob Hlasek 37 132 10 1989-11
Yevgeny Kafeln. 388 157 148 1998-03
Patrick Rafter 156 33 26 1999-02
Jonas Björkman 43 462 29 2001-07
Jürgen Melzer 14 50 14 2010-09
With Melzer’s retirement, there is no active player who held a top ten ranking in singles and doubles at the same week. In other words, he is the last player who held simultaneous top ten rankings in singles and doubles. With Jonas Björkman this makes him one of only two players in this group for the past 18 years! Even in the nineties there were only two players–Rafter and Yevgeny Kafelnikov–reaching this feat, whereas in the eighties there were many others.
Even if this stream of trivia does not tell us much analytically, we can see that players peaking with and without partners on their side of the court are becoming a rare species. The times when they have done so simultaneously are long gone.
Footnotes
1. We look at retired players, because their career high rankings are not subject to change anymore.
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Peter Wetz is a computer scientist interested in racket sports and data analytics based in Vienna, Austria.
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.
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:
More aces: Bertens Fewer double faults: Bertens Higher first serve % won: Bertens More breaks: Bertens Better winners/UE ratio: Bertens Total points won: Bertens 2nd serve % won: Almost equal Winner of match: Vondrousova
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.
