Tennis In Play Odds

I was trading a match this morning and it reminded me of why I love trading tennis so much because the opportunities to make profits are amazing. The match in question was Kolar v Pervak at a WTA tournament in Austria. To give you some background, Kolar is a sixteen year old who has been quite successful on the ITF tour and is obviously one for the future but this is her first WTA tour event. Pervak is a seasoned pro and is ranked 61 in the World.

Anyway, Kolar won an error strewn first set 6 - 4 largely due to the fact that Pervak was serving terribly, she must have had around 10 double faults. Anyway, Kolar then went a break ahead in the second set and in fact raced to a 5 - 2 lead and by this point she was priced at around 1.04 but remember, she was only one break of serve up and was a game away from the biggest win of her career. There wasn't actually much between the players on the day, Pervak was just making more unforced errors.

As you can guess, Kolar tightened up as victory was within her grasp and Pervak won the second set and then went onto win the match so anyone that Layed Kolar late in the second set would have made a great return whilst risking little.

The point I am trying to make is that when trading tennis you have to look at the big picture and work out the real chances of a certain outcome happening. In the example below, whilst Kolar should have been favourite when she was 5 - 2 up in the second, should she really have been priced as low as 1.04. Remember, she is only 16 and has never even played a WTA event before, she was bound to tighten up.

So when trading tennis, don't just look at the ladder interface on ISI Trader, make sure you think about the bigger picture and try and think what each player is thinking. You will find that players are priced too low sometimes as they approach victory as closing out matches is always difficult especially for the underdog.

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