Tennis Betting Guide: How To Make Smarter Tennis Picks
Betting on tennis is a smart way to add some cash to your bankroll, because it doesn’t get as much attention from the books as marquee sports like NFL and NBA. But only unless you make smart tennis picks! This blog will provide an introduction to the basics of tennis betting and some field-tested tips on how to do it right. We’ll give you some extra knowledge to maximize your chances of making money in tennis betting.
Tennis may not be one of the major sports in America, but from a worldwide standpoint it enjoys far more prestige—especially in the betting department. This is due to a number of factors. One, there are so many matches and tournaments almost every week in almost every part of the world. Beyond the main ATP and WTA tours, there are also Challengers and Futures—the proverbial minor leagues of tennis. This sport is pretty much taking place everywhere all the time, and it’s annual “offseason” is nothing more than the month of December. Another reason for its betting popularity is the variety of different bets that can be made: the money line, the game spread, the set spread, and the over/under games total (you can often bet on the over/under sets total, as well).
Understanding The Common Tennis Picks
The money line, of course, is a simple bet on the straight up winner of any match. As with any sport, the decision of a moneyline vs spread bet comes down to your prediction about a particular player in a given match. If you think Serena Williams is going to win and you don’t care about the details, you can bet her on the money line.
The games spread is similar to a point spread in basketball or football, and is decided by how many total games in the entire match your chosen player wins by. Take for example a match between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, where Djokovic is a -2.5 favorite in games. At the end of the match, Djokovic wins 6-3, 7-6, 2-6, 6-3. He has won 21 total games, and Nadal has won 18 total games. A bet on Djokovic would cover the -2.5 game spread. You can also bet on the set spread. In the same match, Djokovic is a -1.5 favorite in sets. Because he won three sets to one, he would also cover the sets spread.
Tennis also offers over/under betting for total games on every match, and on total sets for most Grand Slam matches and later rounds of smaller tournaments. In the above example, let’s say the over/under for sets was 4.5, so the four-set match would have cashed under bets. There were 39 games played in the above example, so the under would have cashed on a total of 39.5 or greater; the over would have cashed on a total of 38.5 or less.
Strategies for Making Smart Tennis Picks
Now that we have general overview of the ways in which you can bet on tennis, let’s discuss some strategies for making successful tennis picks.
There are quite often favorable opportunities to back underdogs on the money line—arguably more often than in other sports. Both the individuality of tennis and the rigors of the sport can make favorites ripe for an upset, and the grueling nature of every season can break down any player’s body by the end of the year. Especially toward the end of the season, almost every man or woman on tour is dealing with injury and could be more likely to turn in a worse performance than the markets would suggest. But really from start to finish on the calendar, upsets happen. Djokovic, the world No. 1, could have a random off day and lose to just about anyone in the top 100 (he lost to world No. 42 Lorenzo Sonego in a 2020 tourney toward the end of the season in October). In general, there is more money line value on big underdogs than there is on big favorites. Yes, you can often find value on favorites in American odds system betting lines, but the risk/reward aspect on bigger favorites generally isn’t worth it.
What is a good play with favorites is putting them together in a parlay. Put two sizable favorites together and the return on investment for a pair of victories would be valuable. Example: if you parlay a -200 favorite and a -300 favorite and they both take care of business, that parlay pays out even money at +100. Sure, -200 to -300 favorites are never quite absolute locks; but you can often find some in that odds range that are pretty darn close to lock status. If you want to stick to single matches by themselves, the aforementioned game spreads and set spreads usually yield better value when it comes to favorites than does the money line. With occasional exceptions, I would much rather take a big favorite to win in straight sets at a Grand Slam (-2.5 sets) at something like -150 than the same favorite on the money line at something like -500.
Pay Attention to Tennis Court Surfaces & Player Health
You can also find great value in tennis by paying close attention to the favorite surfaces for each player. The difference in surfaces is another reason why tennis betting is so intriguing. With the exception of betting on baseball or golf betting, every other sport is played on a standard surface. Tennis has no less than five different surfaces, with players competing on an outdoor hard court, an indoor hard court (often much different conditions than outdoors), indoor carpet, clay, or grass. And the surface on which a match is played is quite often decisive. Barring some kind of injury issue, Nadal is always going to be an overwhelming favorite against Roger Federer on clay; Federer is always expected to beat Nadal on grass. Those are obvious examples that won’t fool oddsmakers. But if you can immerse yourself in player preferences and identify the clay-court specialties of guys like world No. 60 Laslo Djere or world No. 74 Thiago Monteiro, you will give yourself a good chance of beating the books.
Being up to date on injuries is also crucial. If a player is injured before a tournament, it isn’t particularly notable for betting purposes (aside from the futures market, which will be discussed below). However, players quite frequently get injured during tournaments (see Djokovic at this year’s Australian Open)—often not so bad that they have to withdraw, but to the extent that it could hamper them in their next match. Sometimes those injuries are so slight that they don’t impact the betting market, but if you have the benefit of watching matches yourself and notice that a player isn’t moving great or takes an injury timeout that the markets may not recognize prior to the next round, you may be able to capitalize by fading said player. Discussions on Twitter or various tennis message boards can help with this kind of effort if you aren’t able to watch certain matches yourself.
Live Betting is a Smart Tennis Gambling Strategy
It is also worth noting that tennis is one of the most popular sports to bet on from an in-game (aka, live betting) standpoint. Why is that the case? Well, no other sport’s outcomes hinge on a single point or play quite like tennis—and in tennis there can be several of those monumental points or moments within a single match. You can thank the tennis scoring system for that. Example: many times two opponents can both be two points away from winning a set. At 5-5 in a first-set tiebreaker, for example, whoever wins the next point is going to be one point away from winning the set. Whoever loses the next point is going to be three points away from winning the set. Obviously whoever wins that point is going to be a massive favorite in the set—and perhaps even in the overall match. And that same situation could happen again in the second set, the third set, the fourth set, and the fifth. That’s a heck of a lot of momentum swings and odds fluctuations in a single match, the likes of which you rarely see more than once or twice even in the most competitive events in other sports. We will discuss in-play betting more in depth later, but the point is the live markets can go crazy tennis in tennis and you can take advantage of it if you’re paying close to attention to a particular match as it is happening.
What are the Smartest Tennis Picks?
In general I’m keener on single-match betting and in-play betting than on futures bets. Futures are by no means always a bad investment, but value can be harder to find. Over the past decade or so on the men’s side, Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer have completely dominated the sport. You rarely find decent pre-tournament value on them. And even the much longer odds on everyone outside the “Big 3” are rarely long enough to make a smart bettor bite. After all, those non-Big 3 players almost never win (it is likely that Dominic Thiem would not have won the 2020 U.S. Open, for example, if Djokovic hadn’t suffered a fluke default in the fourth round when he accidentally blasted a ball into a lineswoman’s throat in a moment of frustration). It’s somewhat of an opposite story on the women’s side. Nobody is dominant and nobody is reliable in an era no longer dominated by Serena Williams. From the 2017 through the 2020 French Open, 14 Grand Slam events produced 12 different champions. Good luck predicting which woman will be the 13th different champion of this stretch later in 2021!
Despite not loving futures, I was on Serena at +900 and Daniil Medvedev at +450 for the 2021 Australian Open. Both beats were pretty bad, as Serena made a run to the semifinals and looked great doing so only to fizzle out against Naomi Osaka. Medvedev went favorite midway through the tournament when Djokovic got hurt in the third round, and the Russian won five of his six matches in straight sets prior to the final. But Djokovic recovered and ended up denying Medvedev in the final.
The point is there are a lot of bad beats in tennis, even more in individual matches than in futures. That’s just the nature of the scoring system, as discussed above. Your player can be within one point of winning and cashing, and then a few minutes later he or she may have suddenly lost the match. It will make you want to give up tennis betting on the spot. But resist the urge! Hopefully you’ll be on the winning side of those small margins more often than not.
If you employ some of the strategies in this blog that can help you make smarter tennis picks, hopefully that will be the case!