Tennis: does best-of-five mode favor top players like Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer?

The qualifier wrestles with the tennis star for almost four hours, and after losing the first set, Oscar Otte local hero Andy Murray even takes off the next two rounds. But in the end the 151st in the world rankings lost 3: 6, 6: 4, 6: 4, 4: 6, 2: 6.

This duel on late Wednesday evening was one of the most exciting matches so far at this year’s Wimbledon tournament, precisely because it tells of the so popular outsider surprise. Plus ups and downs here and there, everything seemed possible.

Who keeps it up with the underdog, has been wondering not just since Wednesday: Does the best-of-five mode, which is played almost exclusively in men’s Grand Slam tournaments, favor the top players?

This discussion is especially passionate when a player who is far behind his opponent in the world rankings suddenly surprises and can take a sentence or two from his favored counterpart. The French Open provided some examples last month, the most recent being the final, in which world number one Novak Djokovic was 2-0 down against Stefanos Tsitispas – and yet left the field as the winner.

Top players win significantly more often

The data on this are clear: Generally speaking, the top players win significantly more often if three winning sets are played. It doesn’t matter whether you look at the respective top 3, top 5, top 10 or even just the super trio Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Djokovic: The victory rate of the top players always increases by six to seven percentage points, if not Best-of-three, but is played in best-of-five mode.

On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the top players win a good 75 percent of their sets anyway, so the more sets are played, the higher their chances of leaving the field as a winner in the end. So if you assume that a top player has a 3: 1 chance of winning in every set, then, given the additional opportunities in the best-of-five, he has a five percentage point higher chance of winning, as the following graphic shows:

So a good part of this effect is pure math. But wherever people are involved, there is always more to it than that. Motivation on the one hand, after all, Grand Slam tournaments and victories are the ultimate goal for the top players, the tournament schedule for the season is clearly geared towards this. In addition, the mode offers more space for mistakes – and their correction through playful excellence.

For Patrik Kühnen, however, the decisive factor is different. “The great champions have an incredible wealth of experience,” says the long-time Davis Cup captain and today’s TV expert at Sky to SPIEGEL. »You have played the Grand Slam tournaments so often from the first to the last day, you know very well: I need that, be it training, care, massages, nutrition, retreat, in order to achieve my performance in this tournament and to time it so that in the end I also win. “

A Grand Slam tournament itself, having to deliver top performances for 14 days in a row, that is already a mammoth task. “And the top players have played through these 14 days so often. This experience, the routine that results from it and that also gives security, is an unbelievable advantage, «says the 55-year-old. Coupled with the playful extra class and the incentive to always want to make their game better, this is the decisive difference for Kühnen compared to those players who, as the much-vaunted next generation, are still waiting for their first Grand Slam victory. Tsitsipas, Daniil Medvedev, also Alexander Zverev. “You have won 1000 tournaments, 500 tournaments, the next hurdle is now to implement it in a Grand Slam tournament and in the best-of-five.”

Murray and the absolute will to win

This difference was also evident in the match between Otte and Murray, when the former world number one – physically visibly at the end – performed magic in the fifth set, while Otte’s concentration decreased and mistakes increased. “Murray just knows that he can do it because he has already done it, not just once, but several times,” says Kühnen. “Knowledge has immense power.”

In fact, the 34-year-old Scot, who has had to undergo various operations over the years and fought his way back with an artificial hip, is the player who has turned the most 0-2 set deficit in his career. Together with Federer and Todd Martin, Murray has nine successful chases to catch up in matches that already seemed lost.

If you also add the matches in which a player was 1: 2 behind in sets, then Aaron Krickstein comes up with the best odds by far. The American, who ended his career in 1995, was able to win 18 out of 34 such matches (53 percent). Djokovic comes with 16 wins from 36 matches to 44 percent. Incidentally, the Romanian Ilie Nastase came into one of these situations most often (61 matches, 21 wins).

And in the end Djokovic wins

The impression is that top players particularly benefit from the best-of-five mode, currently mainly from Djokovic. In the first two Grand Slam tournaments of the season alone, he had to make at least the fourth set in eight out of fourteen matches. He won three of his fourteen wins in the fifth.

This will once again sets the 19-time Grand Slam tournament winner for Kühnen apart from Nadal and Federer. He recalls the final of the Australian Open 2020 against Thiem, in which Djokovic was 1: 2 behind in sets, and the final of the French Open in May: “Tsitsipas plays the first two sets brilliantly, then Djokovic goes into the dressing room during the break , comes out again and says to himself: Well, I’ve played two hours now, I’m two sets behind, now we’re starting over and I’ll win the next three sets. “

The king of the best-of-five, however, is Stan Wawrinka. The three-time Grand Slam champion from Switzerland, who is currently recovering from an operation on his left foot, succeeds in increasing his win rate by an outstanding 13 percentage points when playing on three winning sets (to around 75 percent). Of the top stars, Nadal, Pete Sampras and Jim Courier benefit most from the best-of-five. Djokovic and Federer follow a little further back in the ranking, but also win more often in the best-of-five than in the game on two sets of wins.

It is also interesting to take a look at the last seats: There you will find Ivan Lendl, among others. The eight-time major winner has the best win rate of all players in matches with two sets of wins, a value that at 82 percent is even higher than his rate for best-of-five (around 81 percent).