[shari91]

It seems the same questions pop up again and again so hopefully this will help a little. I'm obviously not going to put on a public forum everything I use to try to pick winners but here are some basics that may be a good start for someone with limited tennis betting knowledge. I'll keep adding to it as I think of more things and anyone who wants to offer any insight or differing opinions, please feel free to do so.

1. The lines in tournaments become sharper as the week progresses. Seems obvious enough as linesmen will be able to gauge a player's form and motivation as the week goes on and there are fewer players to focus on, but I repeatedly see people upping their stakes in 'big' matches. If you think about it logically, as the field shrinks, the weaker players are usually gone which narrows the gap between two opponents. Why suddenly up your stakes on a match when there's actually a better possibility of either playing winning?

2. Line movement and beating the closing number doesn't carry the same importance in tennis as it does in other sports. Lines are easily manipulated by books to encourage steam and name chasers and because the markets for smaller tournaments are considerably smaller than in a Slam, it doesn't take a lot of money to move a line. Cap your match, determine which player you think will win and assign a % chance of winning and THEN check out the lines. If the price you can get implies a higher chance of winning than your %, place the bet. It's a very simple theory and it works yet people seem to get stuck on this time and time again.

3. There are fixes in tennis and there probably always will be. There are also reverse fixes where an individual or group is toying with the lines in order to drive up the price on a dog as well as the market manipulation by the books I mentioned earlier. This is just a fact of tennis betting and the best advice I can give you is almost a repeat of #2 - When you see lines start to plummet, DO NOT JUMP ON BOARD. If you've placed your bet before the heavy movement started, you may want to cash out if it's moved in your favour to guarantee yourself a profit no matter how small and save yourself the grief. If the line has moved against you quickly, I'd suggest just sticking with your original bet and crossing your fingers that your player pulls it out. Many times people have laid heavy chalk to jump off a bet that looks like a sure loss only to see their original player win, costing them a lot of money in the end.

4. Live betting is a great tool for tennis but it's also a dangerous one. Tennis isn't like other sports where you can gradually see a momentum shift to one team. There are times when a player tanks a set to conserve energy for the next one. There are other times when a player looks like they have the match won but goes on to lose because they've used all of their energy to get that far and they start to commit unforced errors or lose the ability to serve. Be very careful with live betting, especially if you're trying to chase your losses on your initial bet. And don't ever live bet if you're just looking at a scoreboard. Stats and scorelines can be deceiving - they don't factor in how a player is moving, if they look fatigued, if that medical timeout was legit or was a stalling tactic or if a player is starting to become unhinged mentally between points. You can't underestimate the value of watching the match live.

5. You need to invest the time to learn about individual players and try to determine their motivation for each tournament and even each match. Go to the ATP website or even Wikipedia and learn about the point system that's used to determine a player's ranking. Learn what a protected ranking is and why it can be an important factor in a match. Google the hell out of a player before you put money on them - you'll find the most amazing things straight from a player's mouth on their own website, on Twitter or Facebook, and in interviews that you need to Google Translate from a foreign language (players seem to be more forthright when talking to their home media). Are players double partners? Are they from the same country? Do they need to protect points or is the tournament somewhat meaningless other than possibly collecting a paycheck? These are just a few of 100+ questions you could literally focus on if you want to have your best shot at picking a winner. But even if you don't find all the answers you need, you should still have a few more tools to help you to determine how much, if any, you should consider risking on a player in any given match.

[shari91]

6. Learn the rules of your sportsbook when it comes to player retirements. Do they grade based on the first set winner, do they void all retirements, etc? If you know a player is injured and feel there's a chance they retire, depending on the rules of your book you may be better off taking their opponent as the first set winner if that option is available to you. There are many valuable tennis props out there and learning when to take them as opposed to just picking a straight up winner will help you to increase your chance of winning.

7. 'Value' is a term you'll see thrown around a lot when it comes to tennis betting. If you could get $15,000-1 on me playing against a pro, it may seem awfully hard to pass up the chance at a decent payout but in actual fact, what would my chances be, even against a scrub? That's what you need to determine. Although it's very tempting to take massive dogs, especially when you're used to the comparatively low lines offered in other sports, there really isn't any value in a line at all if the odds are still lower than the player's actual chance of winning. Sure you'll score a huge upset play from time to time but in the long run, you'll lose more than you win if the numbers don't add up.

8. One of the biggest traps people fall into when starting out with tennis betting is to assume that because a player is ranked higher than another one, this should equate to a win. This is another area where the importance of understanding how a player accumulates points toward their ranking comes in. And this is also where you can find great odds on a lower ranked player, especially at the start of smaller tournaments, when books are lazy with the lines they hang. A player may be a star on one surface, racking up valuable points in every tournament they play during that part of the season, but the same player may be absolute crap when it comes to playing on a different surface. Their ranking however doesn't change from surface to surface so if you were to bet solely based on their ranks, you'd be asking for trouble. The same logic goes for two players' head to head (H2H) record. This is also used quite often in combination with ranking by lazy books to set lines. The problem however is that there are many variables when evaluating the H2H. What surfaces did they play on? If it wasn't the surface they're playing on now, toss that match out. Was one player coming off an injury? What were the forms of the players heading into the matches? How long had each player been on the Tour when they met up previously and were they on the improve or decline as far as performance is concerned? Does it appear that one player tends to take it easy in that tournament from year to year in order to rest up for another larger tournament on the horizon in the near future? Properly capping a tennis match involves a decent investment of time because it's physically impossible to store all of this info in your head. You need to research and dig deeper past the simple stats and info that seems obvious on the surface as there are clues and patterns often hidden once you look a bit more closely.

[Duff85]

Very nice post Shari! Pleased to be first to reply to it.

[sportscash]

Yeah nice post shari

[noober]

if you play against a pro with odds if 15000 i will place a bet in a bookie that doesn't void retirements

[HeeeHAWWWW]

2. Line movement and beating the closing number doesn't carry the same importance in tennis as it does in other sports.

Yeah, agreed. I compared the opening and closing lines at pinnacle over the last 6 years, the closers were no sharper on average.

I think possibly people get overly convinced by particularly salient facts - eg player1 has a terrible record vs lefties, or player2 hasn't won indoors in 2 years, etc etc, without considering how it affects a particular matchup. Thus you get lots of irrational late money flooding in and distorting a market.

[swiss88]

if you play against a pro with odds if 15000 i will place a bet in a bookie that doesn't void retirements

especially if the opponent is Davydenko in a small tournament in Poland

[nulldah]

this thread should be made sticky

[EaglesPhan36]

You should add that you should never make a bet solely based on a player's ranking. Seen way too many people asking why is player X at this price when they're ranked # whatever. Ranking is a very VERY small part of what you should look at ... and I mean like less than one percent small.


Great post.

[RichardGeorge]

Great post

[shari91]

Thanks for the positive feedback everyone! Hopefully we can make a thread here that will help a few people when they're starting out.

You should add that you should never make a bet solely based on a player's ranking. Seen way too many people asking why is player X at this price when they're ranked # whatever. Ranking is a very VERY small part of what you should look at ... and I mean like less than one percent small.


Great post.

It dawned on me a little while ago that I forgot to mention this. That's just something that I don't even think about anymore and you're completely right - people put too much weighting on a player's ranking when deciding who to take in a match. Especially when they don't understand how the player accumulated points to attain that ranking in the first place. Will go back and edit now.

[tenbas]

Thank you shari, you're great!

this thread should be made sticky

No, it should be copied and pasted to notepad in your computer. Then it needs to be read several times weekly until you memorize it.

[Tsonga]

Very good post shari

[kingsr]

Shari, take these 200 points as a token of our appreciation for the effort you put into this post. Thank you so much for sharing this info. This is what this community forum should be about! Helping one another beat the books! And WINNING!

You are a star! A true Aussie! God bless you sweetheart, and may the gambling gods rain money on you and your family

[shari91]

Shari, take these 200 points as a token of our appreciation for the effort you put into this post. Thank you so much for sharing this info. This is what this community forum should be about! Helping one another beat the books! And WINNING!

You are a star! A true Aussie! God bless you sweetheart, and may the gambling gods rain money on you and your family

Thank you so much for the points king but you really didn't need to do it. Just thought maybe we could all pool our brains and compile something to help out those new to the tennis forum. Hopefully the more people that realise how profitable tennis betting can be once they've learned a few basics, the more heads we can get working together in order to bankrupt the books. Thank you again for the points and your kind words.

[pavyracer]

Great post Shari.

[stomptheboard]

haven't read so much text since college
good info for ppl like me who blow deposits after deposits on tennis

[BBROBOZO]

Great info .... don't like to read that much info at one time , so I read some and came back for more , I would like to know more about betting Tennis , all the info that you can possibly muster post it and I will continue to read .... Thanks !!

[slimpickins]

Thank you for the valuable advise, Shari

[Goat Milk]

very good pst

[ZetaPsi808]

shari what are you saving all the points for? you rarely use them at all.

good luck with your bets!

[Netprofit]

1. The lines in tournaments become sharper as the week progresses. Seems obvious enough as linesmen will be able to gauge a player's form and motivation as the week goes on and there are fewer players to focus on, but I repeatedly see people upping their stakes in 'big' matches. If you think about it logically, as the field shrinks, the weaker players are usually gone which narrows the gap between two opponents. Why suddenly up your stakes on a match when there's actually a better possibility of either playing winning?

absolutely, in fact one should be focused to hit a few winners when opportunities present themselves in the early phase of a tournament and there is no need to make a play unless you feel that there is an edge from quarter finals onwards.

i would add that tennis betting in recent time has become increasingly tricky with a lot of manipulation of matches with huge money involved, sometimes it is so difficult that "hit and run" style of hitting at the right plays at the right time serves me well instead of working on it on a daily basis.

[Netprofit]

3. There are fixes in tennis and there probably always will be. There are also reverse fixes where an individual or group is toying with the lines in order to drive up the price on a dog as well as the market manipulation by the books I mentioned earlier. This is just a fact of tennis betting and the best advice I can give you is almost a repeat of #2 - When you see lines start to plummet, DO NOT JUMP ON BOARD. If you've placed your bet before the heavy movement started, you may want to cash out if it's moved in your favour to guarantee yourself a profit no matter how small and save yourself the grief. If the line has moved against you quickly, I'd suggest just sticking with your original bet and crossing your fingers that your player pulls it out. Many times people have laid heavy chalk to jump off a bet that looks like a sure loss only to see their original player win, costing them a lot of money in the end.

I dun agree with this. You have to run quickly losing the juice when you have the feeling that something is up. Yes there is reverse fixed and you are not 100% sure but with enough experience you know, the same thing happens again and again, "when it is too good to be true, it is not".

[Netprofit]

7. 'Value' is a term you'll see thrown around a lot when it comes to tennis betting. If you could get $15,000-1 on me playing against a pro, it may seem awfully hard to pass up the chance at a decent payout but in actual fact, what would my chances be, even against a scrub? That's what you need to determine. Although it's very tempting to take massive dogs, especially when you're used to the comparatively low lines offered in other sports, there really isn't any value in a line at all if the odds are still lower than the player's actual chance of winning. Sure you'll score a huge upset play from time to time but in the long run, you'll lose more than you win if the numbers don't add up.

I dun agree. Playing dogs more often than not gives you a much better chance of profits in the long term as compared to parlaying and single playing the favourites. This for 2 reasons: 1. the fixes and manipulation as mentioned; 2. the odds / lines offered by sportsbooks are generally much more expensive in tennis vs. the american sports such as football, baseball or basketball.

[shari91]

I dun agree. Playing dogs more often than not gives you a much better chance of profits in the long term as compared to parlaying and single playing the favourites. This for 2 reasons: 1. the fixes and manipulation as mentioned; 2. the odds / lines offered by sportsbooks are generally much more expensive in tennis vs. the american sports such as football, baseball or basketball.

Thanks for including this. I only play dogs 99% of the time although as a tournament continues on throughout the week I'm more open to parlays as the field shrinks. Although I'm always harping on avoiding chalk in my thread, I should've expanded on this here just in case someone hasn't visited me there and isn't sure how I feel about heavy favourites in tennis. Best of luck!

[paco]

Or we could keep our stakes low and just follow Superwoman

[moneygame]

Great post .Thanks

[ronaldo922]

great stuff

[shari91]

Bumped for VegasPlayer.

[beefcake]

I needed a refresher. Good morning Shari. Have the coffee on?

[beefcake]

I dont sleep by the way!

[shari91]

I needed a refresher. Good morning Shari. Have the coffee on?

On my second cup already. I actually had 4 hrs sleep last night for the first time in months and feel worse than when I get 2 or none. Amazing how that works.

[brandoc]

Great post, many thanks for the effort. Do you really mean that you "only play dogs 99% of the time"?? Surely not...

[shari91]

Great post, many thanks for the effort. Do you really mean that you "only play dogs 99% of the time"?? Surely not...

Well that was probably a slight exaggeration but not by much. This past week I didn't play many dogs because there wasn't many that I liked. Then again, because of that, I didn't have many plays.

But normally I stick with dogs or very high-priced favourites. Once in a long while I'll play a -200 favourite but that's pretty rare for me. I played a -160 today and she lost so it's a good sign for me to stick with what I know best. I'll never lay the chalk on something like $1.30 though.

[VegasPlayer]

Bumped for VegasPlayer.

Got it Shari, Thanks again. Always looking for an edge. This will help immensely. Really like the post of collectively breaking the books. Sadly, To many in the forum trying to break each other