Nadal Wins French Open!

OK, technically he hasn't won it yet but I think we all know that his semi final victory over Djokovic yesterday was the real final. The Serb pushed him all the way, just as I expected but in the end my Outright Winner bet was cruelly destroyed after an epic 4 and a bit hour battle. In fact, both matches ended up frustratingly for me, as Tsonga barely put up a fight in his straight sets defeat to Ferrer. Thankfully, with the Nadal match having so many twists and turns (Nadal was broken twice when serving for the match and Djokovic was ahead in the final set despite looking dead and buried both physically and mentally) I was able to recoup much of those losses. Over the  course of those 4+ hours, I entered the market on just 3 occasions, though have to admit, even I was shocked at Djokovic's resilience and fully expected to be taking a hit on this match - so cheers Novak!

I won't be trading either final as I expect Nadal and Williams to win pretty easily, so that's all from me for this week. I'll be posting again next week for the start of the month-long grass court season, as the tour comes to England for Queen's Club, Birmingham, Eastbourne and Wimbledon.

I'll be waving a sad goodbye to the clay court season, as this last  couple of months has been my best ever as a trader and I only wish tennis was played on the red-dirt all year round! That said, the switch to a faster surface didn't make a huge difference last year to my profitability. I tend to stick even more to WTA during this grass swing, as whilst men's games can become serving stale-mates with few changes in momentum, the ladies still tend to throw up plenty of breaks if you pick the right match-ups. I definitely do make small changes to my strategy for matches on quicker surfaces but value is still value and opportunities will still be available. I find that I just have a to be a little more patient in finding them, which doesn't really suit my personality but I've learnt to deal with that over the years.

Actually, a swift look at the calendar shows there is actually a new WTA clay event in Nurnburg starting today - bonza! In fact, looking at the weekend in-play tennis list shows a total of over 50 qualifying matches taking place on Saturday alone, for next week's tournaments. This is a fairly recent addition to Betfair's weekend tennis roster, which rarely used to put these weekend qualifiers in-play. It now means that tennis is tradeable pretty much every day right through the day for over 10 months of the year - though you'll be hard pushed to get matched on most of these weekend games, as all the money will be on the big finals. I'm currently watching a match between two German women, Ozga and Witthoeft (ranked 439 and 213), attempting to qualify for the main draw in Nurnberg. It's live on video and £60,000 has been matched as it comes to a close. Doesn't seem much compared to the £43 million traded on Djokovic-Nadal but considering the participants and the time (Saturday morning CET) and that it lasted less than half the duration, I'd say it shows you just how popular tennis is as an in-play sport. It certainly is still thriving on Betfair.

To finish on, I found an excellent article by Ben Rothenberg on Slate.com about sports gamblers (and traders!) who target tennis players for abuse on Twitter. Here's the link:

“No Wonder Everyone Thinks You Are Garbage”