We all have losses, but there are those who make losses an inevitability and those who think you need to understand the mistakes you make so you don’t make them again. When you are told not to bet on the name, only yesterday Djokovic was knocked out of the Doha tournament by a man who is not known to the general public… You’ll find this advice a hundred times over, in all the sports we offer, and you’ll find it a thousand times over if you have to. Here are our tips for betting on tennis like a pro in online sports betting.
Betting on tennis like a pro: Match selection and odds
This is the beaba of all bettors who play online. There is a plethora of betting options for tennis, although not as many as for other sports. Choosing the right odds, the right type of bet, on the right match will make you a bettor with a good ROI. This rule, common to all betting, has different ramifications for different sports.
You might think that an individual sport would save time on player evaluation. However, this is a big mistake. Betting on Federer repeatedly, without question, because it is common knowledge that he is an exceptional player is a basic mistake. Why is that? Everyone knows it, especially the online bookmakers who will offer low odds for his victory. To make a profit on low odds, you have to bet big to win small. On the other hand, those who had a nose for betting on him when he was only a challenger were able to enjoy good odds without having to take excessive risks. The search for profitability in tennis betting, as elsewhere, is all about finding the right balance between profitable odds and average risk taking.
In an individual sport, finding the right odds means looking for less publicized matches to find more balanced odds. To play on top ten players while preserving a profit margin, you have to wait until the end of the tournaments for the shocks to come. Tennis leaves little room for surprises and for the past 10 years, the domination of three players in the men’s game has not been conducive to an open sport. One could take refuge in “patriotic” bets by following the French players, but their inconstancy is dangerous. This is true today, but we are not immune to a golden generation. All these twists and turns to emphasise once again that you should not bet on players, but on a balance of power. This balance of power can and should lead you to go for bets on the match itself; set, play, handicap bets. These types of bets will quickly replace single bets in your tennis betting strategy.
The question is how to choose the right bet, what are the key factors to consider when estimating how many sets will be played, whether a player will lose a set or not and so on.
Betting on tennis: learning to read the story of a tennis match before it is played
That’s a very pretentious title. We can never read the story of a tennis match or any other sport. We just try to read through different factors what the match might be like. Unfortunately, this is far from an exact science. To simplify matters, there are many factors to consider, some of which are factual and some less rational.
The factual ones are the surface, the weather, the player’s ranking.
Tennis players have preferred surfaces. Nadal, for example, is almost untouchable on clay. We know that this specificity is all Spanish. It’s not a cliché, but the fact is that tennis training is almost exclusively on clay. It is this kind of detail that can help you to bet on a Spanish player in an early season match between two players you don’t know much about. The weather can be very important, especially when it is extreme. The heat wave is a horror for the organism. Playing a match in 5 sets and going on to the next round against a player who has played a quick match can level the playing field.
This can be a selection criterion for you. Try to choose the matches between a player who is tired after a long match against a fresh player. This criterion is not always taken into account by bookmakers. However, a top player can suffer a set before recovering because of fatigue and an outsider who has nothing to lose. The player’s ranking is an interesting variable because it gives you more or less the current level of performance. On its own, it is not optimal. Progression is a more decisive criterion and it can allow you to discover a future top 50, then top 20. An unknown player can thus become a golden goose.
The irrational thing is to try to put yourself in the player’s head. The motivation, the desire and the state of mind. Tennis is an eminently psychological sport. Those who remain at the top for decades are rare because beyond being monsters of the game, they are monsters of phycology. It’s up to you to be a psychologist and to take into account the pressure that can become so great that a player like Federer couldn’t win Roland Garros, that Murray couldn’t handle the pressure of the public waiting for him at Wimbledon.
