Well, I managed to get one thing right on Monday – and that’s that you tend to get a lot of underdog winners in Rio.
On a total disaster of a day for us (as is so often the case when you have a big priced winner the previous day) when all three of my outrights that played lost (one from match points up) there were four underdog winners from seven matches in Rio on Monday.
I’d expect more on Tuesday and one that looks like it may have legs is to back Salvatore Caruso as underdog against Jaume Munar.
Pretty much everything is in Caruso’s favour here: the head-to-head, their respective stats over their last 10 matches each at main level, and their stats at all levels since last June.
Caruso beat Munar as a 3.63 underdog at the French Open last spring/summer when he was able to dictate the play against the defensive Spaniard and he did it again in the Barcelona Challenger in October of last year.
Combining the stats of those two matches is revealing: Caruso held serve 83.9% of the time compared to Munar’s 67.7%, while Munar only won 37.7% of his second serve points in total in those matches.
Looking at the last 10 matches on clay at main level of both players shows us a wide gap between the pair in terms of holds of serve and breaks of serve totals, with Caruso 5-5 win/loss and with a very respectable 101.9 total, while Munar is way down at 89.7.
Checking the same stats in all matches on clay going back to June 1 last year it’s closer, but Caruso is still ahead on 106.9 compared to 105.4 for Munar and neither man has shown much yet this season.
There’s enough here to side with Caruso in this one at a price of 2.45.
Pedro Sousa has beaten Joao Domingues in all four of their completed meetings, yet he’s underdog here, and this is due to injury to Sousa, who was very honest after losing the Buenos Aires final to Casper Ruud.
“Physically I am dead,” Sousa said. “I will see how I recover for Rio, but I am happy to have played my first, and perhaps last, final.”
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Casper Ruud struggled a bit, at least initially, after the high of winning his maiden title and with the change of conditions and different balls to those in Buenos Aires.
Ruud faces Gianluca Mager, who breezed through qualies, and prior to that should have beaten Pablo Cuevas in straight sets in Cordoba, but really threw away his chance before fading in a decider.
Qualifiers went 3-1 win/loss in Rio last year (one qualifier beat another in one match) and none failed to win at least a set, so I think it’s a decent advantage against players that have come from Buenos Aires.
Odds of 3.25 about Mager winning set one are fair enough and worthy of a small interest in these circumstances.
Attila Balazs defeated Pablo Cuevas as a 3.46 chance in the Caltanissetta Challenger in 2018 and the hit and miss Hungarian is roughly the same price this time against Cuevas, who’s coming off the back of an epic choke in Buenos Aires versus a barely moving Diego Schwartzman.
You rarely know what to expect from Balazs and Cuevas does have a good record in Rio, where he’s 13-5 win/loss and with a service hold/break total of 111.6, so it’s a bit of a punt if we’re taking Cuevas on here.
Guido Pella has had difficulty with the aggressive game style of Thiago Monteiro in the past and Pella didn’t look fully fit last week when he was bullied off the court by Juan Ignacio Londero.
Pella was moaning afterwards about the slow conditions and how even Milos Raonic wouldn’t be able to hit a winner here, which is quite funny, given that Pella relies mainly on forced/unforced errors from his opponents to win matches.
Londero didn’t have many problems blasting winners past Pella and Monteiro might do the same, but value looks very thin on Monteiro, who was a 3.50 chance when he last met Pella.
Three of the other matches in Rio’s round one feature players that are struggling badly for form: Borna Coric (lost 10 of his last 11 matches), Lorenzo Sonego (lost his last 11), Marco Cecchinato (lost 20 of his last 22 at main level) and Leonardo Mayer (lost his last eight and is 0-4 in Rio).
In Delray Beach, the underdogs that look viable to me are Ernests Gulbis and Cameron Norrie against Reilly Opelka and Taylor Fritz respectively.
Gulbis has an unbelievable record in Delray Beach, with a 17-2 mark in all matches here and while his record against big servers is as patchy as you’d expect from a player who’s so inconsistent the Latvian has a live chance against Opelka, who was poor last week.
Soon Woo Kwon showed early on last night how hard it can be to go from indoor to outdoor conditions and Opelka didn’t look at all in form in New York, so it’s certainly possible that Gulbis has a big advantage here coming from qualies.
Gulbis didn’t face much of a challenge from Bernard Tomic in those qualies, but he clearly has a great affinity with this tournament from years gone by and given how often qualifiers go deep here I would be tempted to take a punt on Ernie outright, but 25-1 is a touch short.
Cam Norrie has beaten Taylor Fritz before and I think the slow conditions in Delray Beach will probably suit the Brit, while Fritz has failed to produce his best here and hasn’t played since losing to Mitchell Krueger at the Newport Beach Challenger over a fortnight ago.
Norrie (who, coincidentally, beat the very same Krueger in qualies here) is notoriously unreliable, but this is a winnable match for him, and because he’s in a very open section of the draw I like the idea of having a small each-way outright on him at 50-1.
Should he beat Fritz today, the rest of the quarter is hardly daunting, with Brandon Nakashima, Noah Rubin, Jason Jung and Yoshihito Nishioka the opposition, so I don’t mind having a small play at this price, while if you can get the same price on Gulbis that could pay off, too.
The Open 13 in Marseille was very disappointing on Monday and not just because we lost there, but due to the lack of TV in any of the matches, so we’re guessing a bit as to what happened there.
Richard Gasquet couldn’t buy a first serve, averaging around 40% for the first two sets, which gave him too much to do and his final percentage of 50% was his worst since Kitzbuhel last July when he got 33% of them in against Philipp Kohlschreiber.
The only one I’m tempted with in Marseille on Tuesday is to take on Marin Cilic, who may well be distracted with a new baby and while he played better in Melbourne than we saw for some time from him Ilya Ivashka is battle hardened at the moment and set one to him at 1.88 doesn’t look the worst wager.
But I’d like to be able to watch the action, so I’ll stick with Rio and Delray Beach on Tuesday.
Best Bets
0.5 points win Caruso to beat Munar at 2.45
0.5 points win Mager to win set one at 3.25
0.5 points win Gulbis to beat Opelka at 2.25
0.5 points each-way Norrie to win Delray Beach at 51.0
