[gregm]

Justin talks about tennis wagering, interesting mention of suspicious Volandri retirements. Volandri certainly has some poor retirement numbers. This was from a thread last year, I havent updated these stats. http://www.sportsbookreview.com/forum/tennis-bet...ent-stats.html

Justin7 on Behind the bets http://espn.go.com/espnradio/play?id=9020077

Most retirements and withdrawals.

Michael Llodra (27)
Nicolas Kiefer (28)
Filippo Volandri (26)
Nikolay Davydenko (25)
Zverev (25) another young player
Marcos Daniel (23 ),
Xavier Malisse 19
Paul-Henri Mathieu (19)
Victor Hanescu (18),
Jose Acasuso (17)
players on (16),
includes Philipp Kohlschreiber, Richard Gasquet, Steve Darcis, Rob Kendrick and Rainer Schuettler.
Juan Martin Del Potro (15, in a very short career)
Bogomolov, Istomin, Tursunov, Mayer, Stepanek, Roddick, Youzhny, Tsonga, Monfils,
and Gonzalez (12- 15)

Fewest retirements and withdrawals

Federer 2 withdrawals and has never retired in a match.Never. Thats a Brett Favre-like stat , an amazing stat in an amazing career.

James Blake 1
Sam Querrey 1
Alejandro Falla 0 in 152 matches
Clement 1
Gil 1

[Hardcoar]

If it turns out Federor has been taking PEDs all along I'd seriously consider suicide based solely on that. I may be young, but I feel free to speculate he must be one of the most admirable, inspiring athletes throughout history, in most every single way I can think of.

Missing Tipsarevic, and yes – contrary to the naive beliefs of many, fixing is prevalent in this sport. Not in terms of match %, but frequency. In fact, quite a few "top" players have definitely fixed matches, Azarenka being the most outstanding example of this. Very little is proven by authorities, who give jack shit and do jack shit. Live with it!

How do I know? By following the money – pre and live match odds movements, betting patterns, amounts wagered, and results.

See Bogomolov's (known fixer, by the way) latest qualifier match against Pella for a shining example. You'd think he'd want to actually try and qualify for a masters. Sigh...

[yisman]

yeah I was on espn last night and noticed this as well (advertised millman's podcast with justin about fixing). Didn't listen to the podcast yet though

[gregm]

I put the Tipsarevic in that original post on tennis retirement stats but didnt include it here hardcoar, I havent updated those stats for this year and I know Tipsarevic has continued his retiring ways. He has achieved a golden retirement slam

Tipsarevic retired in the

Australian Open: 2007
US Open: 2007
Roland Garros: 2009
Wimbledon: 2011
Olympics:2008

It makes you really stand back and look at a guy like Federer who has never retired in a match, incredible. People like Nadal get the deserved reputation of being a ruthless competitor and fighter but Fed just does it quietly, never retiring is an amazing stat in this day and age. Fed is so much like Sampras, so calm ,that you lose sight of what a dominant athlete he really is.

[yisman]

lousy podcast actually.

Justin doesn't want to actually give out any info so it's just some generalities.

[gregm]

There is alot of stuff from the sloane conference online. I just wish Millman and Justin7 had of gone into more depth about line moves in tennis instead of line moves and suspicions of fixed matches. Just for instance today, the Davis/Halep Line went from davis -141 yesterday to -250 today at pinnacle finally closing around -217 at pinnacle (closed at-250 at sbobet) and of course Davis lost. Davis line was all over the place on the exchanges as well, Justin made a comment in the podcast about a paper, he wrote it to get in a school he was applying at, about market efficiencies in tennis and his paper said the line move was as predictive in tennis as it was in other sports?

The tennis market is so different than alot of sports, I just wish they went into more detail on the tennis market and how to really bet tennis in the states without using agents for betfair and pinnnacle, vegas and tennis, and the volume of tennis wagering in europe and asia and more info on his modeling. One guy I hope they have at sloane and on millman is Jeff Sackmann, he is one of the more interesting quantitative analysis guys out there, writes for wall street journal and has some interesting sites .

[gregm]

If you havent seen this video on gambling in tennis it is definitely worth watching, over 4 years old but very interesting

[gregm]

I am watching more of these sloan conference videos. Really looking forward to them getting up Haralabos Voulgaris video from this year. I will try and post some more of these sloan videos in this thread but I came across this when someone mentioned it at Sloan.

I am getting this set up for live wagering. lol

[BrianLaverty]

I have had first hand knowledge of match fixing in tennis... just gotta know the right people. And just so you guys know, its not the Russians that you necessarily have to worry about- The biggest match fixers are the clay courters from South America....

[gregm]

Sportradar runs a fraud detection system for match fixing. They have system that runs algorithms which identify strange deviations or odds and irregular betting patterns. I think there is something up half the time I watch a betfair screen,I cant imagine how strange patterns are really proved. They have their work cut out for them.

[swissbank007]

all the pics ive chosen that lose are fixed!!!!as simple as that!!!!

[gregm]

lol. I think about it all the time in tennis and soccer. Finally got to watch more of these sloane conference videos. Pretty good article on analytics in new espn mag. I couldnt load the tennis analytic video but go to this soccer video and tennis video is on there



Meet the world's top NBA gambler

This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's March 4 Analytics issue.

Bob Voulgaris had become one of the most successful sports gamblers in the world when, in 2004, he started to lose. It wasn’t just a streak of bad luck, a series of randomly unfavorable outcomes that could last only so long. His edge, he realized, was gone.

He had begun betting on sports in the late 1990s, and within five years, before he had reached his 30th birthday, Voulgaris had accumulated a fortune. He says he routinely wagered a million dollars in a single day of NBA games. He considered his mean to be an unholy winning percentage that approached 70 percent. A man of no fixed address, he dated models and traveled the world. He was also an accomplished poker player, buying his way into high-stakes games from Las Vegas to Macau. He was essentially leading the fantasy life of your basic under-35 North American male.

A specialist in the NBA, his sports gambling success was almost completely the result of a kind of studied perspicacity, born of a talent for pattern recognition and the stamina to watch uncountable hours of televised basketball. In betting parlance, the man could suss out an edge -- and in 2002, he discovered one that would line his pockets for years. It all had to do with how most bookmakers set their halftime totals, the predicted number of points scored in each half of the game. Each half, of course, is its own discrete period of play, and the fourth quarters of close games can end in elongated foul-clogged stretches of free throws, timeouts, fast play and, hence, a burst of scoring. But incredibly, bookmakers at the time didn’t account for this fact; they simply arrived at a total for the full game and cut that figure roughly down the middle, assigning some 50 percent of the points to the first half and 50 percent to the second.

full story http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/dol...op-nba-gambler

[gregm]

This is brilliant. IBMs new slamtracker would be incredible if you could get it for more tourneys

[gregm]

New Sloan conference videos finally up

Haralabos Voulgaris

cant embed into sbr for some reason

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=UWJ6D0ivZH0#!