Dogs on Tour

I mentioned yesterday that:

...if the Women's game is your preference, stick to underdogs from the fourth round onwards.

I decided that it might be worth taking a look at how this strategy has played out this season across all tournaments on the Sony Ericsson WTA Women's Tour. 

The Fourth Round in Grand Slams is the Round of 16, or Eighth-final, for non-slam events, and after 34 total tournaments, backing the underdog would have returned a profit of between 25.32 and 36.16 points from 501 bets, and ROI in the 5% to 7.2% range. 

On the face of it, not bad, but when we consider the returns from Grand Slams alone I mentioned yesterday, it's clear that this is a losing strategy across the 31 non-slam events.

I did learn something through this little exercise, which is that the Women have three tiers of event - Grand Slam, Premier and International, and in the 19 International Tournaments so far, this strategy is up between 27.34 and 34.37 points. 

Incidentally, on Hard surface tournaments, the strategy is up between 46.66 and 53.11 points most of that on Outdoor courts.

So far so good, but the season is 60 tournaments long, so I went back to 2016. Backing the underdog in the later rounds (Round of 16 to Final) would have won between 47.50 and 74.52 points from 876 bets, a similar ROI to that so far in 2017.

2015?, I hear you ask. It just keeps getting better. Only 59 tournaments that year, but the strategy is up between 60.71 and 85.93 points from 837 bets, an even higher ROI than 2016 and 2017.

So from 2015 to date, backing underdogs in the last 16 or later in every WTA event would have won between 133.53 and 196.61 points from 2,214 bets, an ROI of between 6% and 8.9%. 

This is in no way a criticism of them, you can't beat free and they are very useful, but be careful if you decide to use the Tennis-Data.co.uk spreadsheets yourself, as there are several errors in them. Typically the Maximum isn't the maximum, and other times the favourite and underdog are incorrect, but a simple validation will catch these and manually correcting them isn't difficult.

I've also noticed that while there are not hat many, walkovers are included in the sheets which I should probably adjust for. Perhaps someone more familiar with tennis betting than myself can confirm that books generally only pay out on completion of the first set.