We're back in Paris for the French Open and let’s not beat around the bush: this is a dreadful tournament for betting underdogs, with on average 81% of the favourites winning in the last six years, so it’s a fortnight where I’ll be very selective on wagers and stakes.
Even the opening rounds don’t often provide a decent frequency of dog winners, with 20% in round one and a miserly 15% in round two in the years between 2013 and 2018 inclusive.
The longer best-of-five set format means that we get more tie breaks than at your usual tour event on clay, with the tournament average (last five years) standing at 41%.
The rounds that currently have the highest number of tie break matches in them (last five years) are round three (49%) and the quarter finals (48%), with round four down at 34%.
We start with 16 men’s round one matches on day one – mainly from quarter three – and we’re expecting (if the forecast is correct) a dry, cloudy day with a bit of wind around (15kph) on Sunday.
Stefanos Tsitsipas looks a tad short at 1.03 to say the least against Maximilian Marterer on the German’s best form, but he’s struggling with knee problems at the moment and doesn’t appear as if he’ll be competitive.
Another one that looks very short – perhaps based on the fitness of the opponent – is Grigor Dimitrov, whose price of 1.16 against Janko Tipsarevic seems crazy.
Dimi once lost to Ivo Karlovic in straight sets here as a 1.11 chance and even last year as a 1.17 shot he went all the way to 10-8 in the fifth against Jared Donaldson.
The Bulgarian is just 7-8 win/loss here in his career and Tipsarevic has been playing some decent tennis in his comeback from injury, so I’d be surprised if this was anything like an easy starter for Dimitrov, who now has Andre Agassi and Radek Stepanek trying to coax the best out of him.
The over games looks decent here, but Tipsy's fitness is a definite concern.
David Goffin has a decent record here at the French Open, but he’s been playing so poorly this season that it’s hard to fancy him at 1.11 against anyone, let alone an opponent who’s won three of their five career clashes.
The obvious issue with Goffin’s opponent, Ricardas Berankis, is that he’s not up to much on clay and hasn’t won a set at the French Open main draw since 2013, but it’s a match-up of similar styles and Berankis won’t be overpowered here.
He’ll probably be outmanoeuvred on the clay, but Berankis has either won the match or the first set in four of their five meetings (all on hard) and they’ve both won the same amount of second serve points and held serve the same amount of time against each other.
With Goffin in his current funk, the 3.95 on Berankis winning set one is interesting.
On his day at a major Quentin Halys can cause plenty of problems with his powerful game and not one of his last 19 sets in the main draw of a major has been done in fewer than nine games (14 have gone to at least 10 games).
If the unpredictable Halys is on a go day – and he usually is at majors as a wild card – he can have a swing against a Kei Nishikori that’s in rotten form at the moment and this may go long.
Halys is in good nick at the moment, having made the final of a good challenger at Aix En Provence a couple of weeks ago, losing in a final set to Pablo Cuevas, so I’m hopeful of a performance here.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with Kei these days, but he looks like he’d rather be somewhere else than on a tennis court a lot of the time and in Rome he should have been beaten by a choking Jan-Lennard Struff in two sets and was beaten in straights in a woeful showing against Diego Schwartzman.
He might show up better here, but recent form is poor, and with nothing to lose and the crowd on Halys’ side on Lenglen Court I like the over 33.5 games here.
Other options on Sunday include taking on Diego Schwartzman in some way, as he looks too short at 1.28 against Marton Fucsovics, with this price surely based on one good result for Schwartzman that he had in Rome.
It may well the base case that Rome kick starts Diego’s season, which was poor up until then, but statistically (over the last 12 months at main level on clay) there’s little to separate these two players.
Over 3.5 sets looks decent in that one, if a tad short at 1,71.
So, a few options on day one and I’ll start off with a couple of small bets on Sunday.
Best Bets
0.5 points win over 33.5 games in Nishikori/Halys at 1.95
0.5 points win Berankis to win set one at 3.95
