Just came up with this on my jogging trip today..

Hypothesis: ATP 250 events and some ATP 500 events have 28 or 32 person fields. In scanning the winners of these in last years I noticed that many times an unseeded player makes a run to the semis,final or wins the tourney. How about betting futures on all unseeded players in each of these tourneys, with a few filters involved.

1.No Qualifiers(4)
2. No Wildcard's(4)

These combined I can count on one hand that have won tourneys in the past 5 years..

There are usually 8 seeded players(unless someone withdraws and a Lucky Loser is added),eliminate them.

So this leaves about 12-16 unseeded players per tourney to bet futures on. Obviously way to many and risking that many units per tourney would never get you a profit.

So in addition how about running these players through two more filters..

1.Any player that has never won an ATP event..Eliminate them.
2. Then of those players left that have won an ATP event, if it has not been on the surface said tourney is on, cross them out..
3. The ones remaining..those are you futures plays..

Advantages of doing this for ATP 250's(maybe not so for the few 500's)

1. Some times top flight talent do not play these.
2. Ones that do are usually getting prepped for other 500's with more players than 32,1,000s and majors and their best effort is not put forth some times.
3.Lower level players know that they can do well here and maximum effort is shown from them to gain valuable points and money.
4. Sometimes you will get breaks if top flight players don't play and (example Federer this week) drop out due to exhaustion or injury from hard fought tourneys the week before, where youre futures bets might be +3000 on the Sunday before the tourney, then said #1-5 player drops out and suddenly you're getting value on that bigger dog because that top flight was in your side of the bracket and you have an easier road to the final.
5. Top challenger players sometimes do well enough in those tourneys to get in too these as unseeded players and are hot.


Would be fun as hell to track after this weeks tourneys.

In theory it might do well in non-prep periods unlike this week for grass and maybe on weeks before Majors like Nice(clay), greensboro (hard) and the shite end of the year tourneys leading up to London.


Its late and Iv'e had maybe one too many..But does anyone think this might be sound logic?