Australian Open Tennis Betting - Who's Money (Part I)

Since BetUS went to press with the men’s Aussie Open futures in the fall of 2009 to today, the market has understandably moved. A lot has happened over the course of the last few months to influence the market directly. In fact, a lot has happened in the last few weeks, days, even, to move the markets; heck, they have moved since my esteemed colleague, Eric Williams weighed in on the Aussie Open market for ye tennis-betting loyalists just yesterday. If you haven’t checked out his lowdown on the market, you really should. It is always advisable to get as many perspectives as possible before laying down your wager. It helps that is rather a good take on the Aussie Open, if I do say so myself.

What do all the price fluctuations in the Aussie market indicate? Obviously, that this is the most wide-open grand slam in recent history. The bookies are less certain than ever before in deciding who the outright favourite is, and tennis bettors are loathe committing wholeheartedly on just one frontrunner. The popular trend right now is to hedge bets by picking a few players that have a reasonable shot, thereby, minimizing risk exposure in the outright market.

Then again, we come full circle to run into the same problem: there are so many that arguably have a reasonable shot, so how does one decide which group of players to back. Dilemma, dilemma.

One way to go about is logical elimination – applying the principle of logical elimination to get a probabilistic diagnosis of those that have a real shot bound by universal axioms of probability. In short, get rid of the no-hopers, outsiders and pretenders and you are left with a select few that are serious contenders

Got it? So let us get to the brass tacks.

If you don’t mind – I know this might seem funny – but I am going to skip a few steps of the process; that is, I am going to skip the whole eliminating of the no-hopers, outsiders and believe it, the pretenders as well. Reasons are twofold: firstly, they take up too much space, space they are not really worth and that I don’t have to give; secondly, Eric Williams has done a fab job identifying them already. No sense in being redundant is there. Suffice it to say, most players sitting next to a five-digit price-point (in other words, hallucinatory odds) are deemed a no go. Do I really need to explain why? Oh go on, simply because the chance of winning such a bet, i.e. your investment-return ratio, is about 0.01%. That is being generous, if you can believe. I don’t know anyone willing to lay money down on instances with such a low percentage likelihood of a payout. Do you?

So what are we left with but the dark horses and the real contenders (hold your horses, I will identify all in mere moments). First a bit of a prologue.

The dark horse category is trickier of the two because it includes players synonymous with potential but that continuously underachieve, and those that perpetually threaten to achieve only to graduate to real contenders. With the former it is a matter of if, the latter, a matter of only when.