Tuesday’s play at Indian Wells got off to a fine start when our 3.25 chance Filip Krajinovic took down Daniil Medvedev in straight sets and our outright hopes were boosted when top seed and tournament favourite Novak Djokovic lost to Philipp Kohlschreiber.
Guido Pella wasn’t up to it on the day against John Isner, which was disappointing, but our 80-1 outright Dominic Thiem now has his chances to make the semi finals (1.33 favourite tonight and 4-0 head-to-head over Gael Monfils)
Thiem has never faced big serving veteran Ivo Karlovic before, but his record against big servers on slower surfaces gives us reason to expect a positive outcome.
Thiem’s 7-1 win/loss against the big servers in my database on clay and rarely has a hard court played more like a clay surface than this one at Indian Wells.
The Austrian has won four of his last five on all surfaces against that set of big servers and looking at Ivo’s stats on outdoor hard versus the players I have listed as ‘top-10 quality’ (of which Thiem is one) he’s broken serve only 3.9% of the time in his last 10 matches against them.
Karlovic is 5-8 win/loss in tie breaks in those matches and I’m fairly confident that Thiem on this surface can get the job done against the 40-year-old in these conditions.
Talking of big servers, the clash between Milos Raonic and Jan-Lennard Struff seems likely to be decided by a few points here and there, but if Struff can make a decent amount of first serves (say, 60%) he has a fine chance of the upset.
Struff beat Raonic in similar conditions to these in Dubai a few weeks ago and he only got 49% of first serves in that day (Raonic 65%) while when he lost to Raonic at Wimbledon in 2017 he made 51% (Raonic 67%).
The German averages around 56% in his career and needs to make at least that amount one feels if he is to get the better of Raonic (who averages 63%), who had to launch a very late comeback to get the better of Marcos Giron on Monday.
Round four of Indian Wells has produced the most tie breaks of any of the rounds (41% of matches featuring at least one) barring the final in the last decade and one looks likely here.
But the three matches for me where the underdog could have their chances (zero underdogs won in round four here last year and just 23% have won this decade on average) are the ones involving Kyle Edmund, Philipp Kohlschreiber and Karen Khachanov.
Edmund has never faced Federer and much depends on how the Brit responds to playing a legend of the game in a Masters 1000 event. He may go into his shell, but if he plays his natural game Edmund has a chance of pushing the Swiss on current form.
I must admit, I expected Kohlschreiber to choke on several occasions against Djokovic on Tuesday, but he didn’t, and despite the awful head-to-head against Gael Monfils I’d give him a fair shot today.
I said earlier in the week that Kohli loves the conditions here at Indian Wells, where it allows him, almost forces him, to be aggressive and with his top spin control he’s pretty effective here.
If we look at his three matches on the slowest surfaces (clay) against Monfils there’s nothing in it, with both men holding serve 79.3% of the time in those three encounters and much of the career series results have come from a lack of belief on the part of the German.
Surely that win over Djokovic will have boosted his often brittle confidence and it’s not as if conditions here have suited Monfils so far in his career (one quarter final in 10 tries and two wins over John Isner are his best in terms of rankings).
Who knows what the Kohlschreiber brain will make of the match-up today, but I’m prepared to take over 2.5 sets in these conditions at 2.48.
The other bet I’ll take is to side with Karen Khachanov against John Isner, with the Russian having got the better of Isner all three times they’ve met so far and he leads comfortably when we look at the stats of those meetings.
Isner has failed to break the Khachanov serve at all in nine sets on clay, hard and indoor hard, while Khachanov has won 11% more points on first serve and 10% more on second serve than the American.
The high bounce here suits the Khachanov forehand strike point and while I’ve said for years that Isner is also well suited by conditions at Indian Wells I’m not sure that in this match-up he should be a 1.61 chance, despite Khachanov’s slow start to the season.
Khachanov was a 1.59 shot when he beat Isner in Paris only four months ago and this reverse in the odds when taking the stats into account looks wrong, so with Isner's lack of ability to break the Khachanov serve in mind the +1.5 games on Khachanov at 1.92 looks the bet.
Best Bets
1 point win Khachanov +1.5 games to beat Isner at 1.92
0.5 points win over 2.5 sets in Kohlschreiber/Monfils at 2.48
