Tag Archives: #frenchopen

Yesterday I looked at trading a tennis match on just the first game of the first set in a tennis match. Today I will look at the risk to reward of a trade where, when the conditions are right, we can lay the favourite if he/she is serving for the 9th game and the scores are 4 games each in the first set. As I explained in the first post in this series we get the biggest movement of odds when a break of serve occurs in a set or match. If we look at a more critical stage of a match such as the later stages of the first set where the scores are level after the 8th game then if the favourite is serving the 9th game and his/her opponent can break the serve then they would be serving to win the set in the next game. I will use Bet Angels Tennis Trader feature to demonstrate this a little more clearly than just quoting numbers. In the screenshot below I have manually set the score to 4-4 in the first set of the first round match of the French Open between Nadia Podoroska and Jessika Ponchet. Podoroska is the favourite to win this match and will probably start the match at odds of somewhere around 1.75. If the first set reaches 4 games all then Tennis Trader project her odds to be around 1.78 (the figure ringed in the set matrix)

If Podoroska wins this service game then her odds would move in to 1.66, a movement of 12 ticks. If however Ponchet can break the serve at this critical stage of the set then she would then be serving for the set in game 10 and Podoroskas odds would move significantly the other way to somewhere around 2.88. This is a movement of around 65 ticks. We can now determine a trading strategy based on these two outcomes of the 9th game and place a trade accordingly knowing our potential loss or profit. Because the biggest movement in these two scenarios are upwards in terms of ticks then we would be looking to LAY Podoroska just before the start of the game. As we are putting our trade into the market during in-play we have to take account of the fact that betfair imposes a 3 second delay from when we place the lay bet to when it actually enters the market. While this shouldnt be a problem with high volume markets it could be a problem with markets that have low liquidity so this is one of the factors we should address when we are framing the trade – if there is low liquidity we may not getour lay bet matched. This aside we can work out our risk to reward in the following way.
If we LAY Podoroska at odds of 1.78 for a stake of £10 then our Liability would be £7.80
If Podoroska goes on to win the game then we would have to trade out of the match by backing her at odds of 1.66 for a stake of 10.72 so our loss on this trade if podoroska wins the game would be in the region of 72p
If Ponchet breaks Podoroska’s serve then with the same lay bet in place we would, at the end of the game , be able to place a back bet on Podoroska at odds of 2.88 for a stake of £6.18 giving us a profit of around £3.74 so our risk to reward would be 72p loss or £3.74 profit.
These figures might be a bit bewildering and you might wonder how I came by them. The answer is simple I used a lay bet calculator freely available across the internet in particular I used the free hedging calculator on https://www.goalprofits.com/hedging-calculator/

I looked at 188 matches last week and set betangel to automatically trade a match where this scenario met the conditions above ie
The favourite must be serving for the 9th game
The game scores must be 4-4
I also added another condition that the odds of the favourite at the start of the 9th game must be between 1.5 and 1.9
Of the 188 matches only 5 met the criteria and 2 of these trades saw the favorite’s serve broken.
If you want to learn more about automating trades such as these using bet angel you can download a trial copy by clicking this link