usa_1 USA

Tennis Handicap Betting Guide

Tennis Handicaps

Table of contents

  1. ❓What is Handicapping?
  2. 🔍Factors to Consider
  3. 📊Live Betting
  4. ✅Conclusion

To begin making money consistently betting on tennis, it is important to understand how to handicap tennis odds. It’s a process that, with enough experience, will help you to identify errors in sportsbook prices and capitalize on them.

In this article, we’ll explain to you what handicapping is and how you can use it to become a consistently successful, profitable tennis bettor. You can also access our page of free tennis predictions here!

Join DraftKings today

What is Handicapping? 

Handicapping is the process of considering a wide range of factors to predict the theoretical advantage that one competitor has over their opponent in a sporting contest.

In terms of tennis betting, specifically, handicapping involves predicting not only the winner of a match but also the likely margin of victory in order to determine their superiority.

If a bettor can accurately predict this margin, they can study the available bookmaker odds on the match and conclude whether the favorite has been overestimated or underestimated to inform their own betting strategy on the contest.

Factors to Consider When Handicapping Tennis Odds

There are a wide range of variables that influence the outcome of a tennis match which you should consider when handicapping it. There is far more to consider than simply who the better player is. In this section we’ll walk you through some of the main considerations to be aware of.

Ranking Position

A player who is higher in the world rankings should, by definition, be the more likely to win a match, right? Not necessarily.

First of all rankings don’t always accurately represent how good a player is. If they’ve had time off through injury or, perhaps, are an up-and-coming talent who simply hasn’t played in enough tournaments to reach their true position, then you may find that the two players are a lot closer in ability than the ranking positions suggest.

A good strategy is to try and identify players with false ranking positions and, if the odds aren’t truly representative of their ability, you may have found a value underdog to bet on.

Playing Surfaces

Tennis is relatively unique among most professional sports in that the same players compete on multiple different types of playing surfaces throughout a season and certain players are specialists on particular court types.

A famous example is Rafa Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, who in his prime was a clay court specialist.

Nadal won 22 majors in his career but 14 of those victories came in the French Open, the biggest clay tournament of the season. 

Between 2005 and 2022, Nadal only failed to win four of the 18 French Open events. In the same period, by comparison, he won two Wimbledons and two Australian Opens. 

Although this is still incredibly impressive, it also demonstrates his relative vulnerability on those surfaces compared to clay.

Much of court specialism comes down to nationality, with players from around the globe learning to play on different surfaces depending on where they grew up. Understanding who plays well on each surface will help you predict the outcome of their matches.

Playing Styles

Another factor, which is related to the different surfaces, is playing style.

Different tennis players excel in multiple areas of the, including serving, returning, forehand, backhand, slice and movement around the court. It is the players with a strong all round game who truly succeed in the long term.

John Isner, for example, is renowned for having arguably the greatest serve in tennis history. At 6 foot 10 he hit the fastest ever recorded tennis serve at 157.2 miles per hour and was infamously difficult to break serve against.

However, his height also impacted his movement around the court which meant that he didn’t break serve often enough to dominate matches and truly compete with the players at the very top of the world rankings on a consistent basis.

For this reason, Isner’s matches were often extremely long and with few breaks of service. Any breaks that did occur were likely to be decisive. Therefore, backing his matches to go the distance and, often, for his sets to go to tie breaks would be a prudent betting strategy against players who were, themselves, strong at serving.

Using knowledge of different playing styles in games and how contrasting styles might play out against each other can be a key aspect of successful tennis handicapping. Checking head-to-head records between certain players can be a useful indicator of this.

Mental Strength

There is a significant difference between playing in front of a relatively small audience in low-profile tour events against playing in front of a packed Wimbledon Centre Court with millions of viewers watching at home on TV.

The history of tennis is littered with players who, despite possessing undeniable ability, wilted under pressure on the biggest stages and, therefore, never enjoyed the success that perhaps their talent deserved.

Mental strength is one of the key factors that sets the greatest ever players, such as Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic, apart from other players from their era.

Being able to predict how certain players will react in situations, particularly younger, inexperienced players, can help you to understand how a match might play out.

This also includes whether a player can bounce back from a bad loss in their next tournament. Will they have the mental strength to recover or will it kickstart a run of negative form?

Join DraftKings today

Form

Tied into mental strength, form can play a huge part in installing confidence in a player and help them to go on an extended winning run.

If a player has just won a big tournament, you might argue that they would be tired the following week. Alternatively, you could argue that they will be brimming with confidence which will sweep them through subsequent matches. Which is a greater factor? That’s down to you to decide.

Detecting a positive run of form in its early stages can help you gain an edge over the bookmaker if they are yet to pick up on it and this is where watching games live can help you to read player’s moods and body language.

Fitness

If a player is recovering from a period on the sidelines due to an injury, it can take them a while to recover their match fitness and form. Sometimes players can even pick up a niggling injury during a victory in a tournament, which can hinder them in the following game.

Staying clued up about which players have been injured, what kind of injury it was, whether it might impact their game and if they’re fully recovered can really help you detect whether a heavy favorite may struggle more than anticipated in a match.

Checking social media for clues about player fitness can be a useful tool at your disposal.

Tournament Motivation

There are certain tournaments that every player on a circuit will put everything into. 

The four majors are, of course, the pinnacle of the sport but also the high-profile events such as Indian Wells, Rome, Madrid and Miami are also highlights of the schedule.

However, these major tournaments are often preceded by less prestigious warm-up events and these are often ripe for predicting upsets.

Let's say, in theory, one of the biggest players is set to appear in the Queens tennis event prior to Wimbledon but is slightly hampered with an injury. Are they likely to give the event 100% and risk aggravating the health concern and potentially missing Wimbledon?

A likelier outcome is that they might take it easy which could lead to an upset. The same logic could apply to a tournament which they are committed to play in immediately after a win. Are they going to follow that same intensity for another week or will they slow down?

Meanwhile, the lower ranked opposition players might give it their all in these tournaments, sensing the opportunity to claim a scalp and gain valuable ranking points.

It is vital to understand the importance of each tournament and the personal motivations of each player going into it.

Men vs. Women

Another factor that relates to playing styles, it is vital to understand the key differences between male and female players, particularly when it comes to serving success.

Men tend to have significantly harder and faster serves than women, which results in a far higher percentage of service breaks on the WTA tour.

To use an extreme example, John Isner won 92% of service games across his career and never progressed further than the semi-finals of a major event or ranked higher than number eight in the world.

Meanwhile, Latvian tennis star Jelena Ostapenko has been ranked as high as fifth in the WTA world rankings and won the French Open, yet her career service record is just 74.9%.

The men's and women's games are entirely different, which should be factored into your betting strategy.

Live Betting

Being able to read the way that a match is unfolding or to understand the significance of an event during a game can give you a significant edge over a sportsbook whilst live betting, with the bookmakers forced to rapidly update the odds with little time to consider wider factors.

Has a sportsbook overreacted to a break in play in a women’s game when, as the previous section discussed, it is highly likely that a breakback will occur? That could be the moment to back the player who has just been broken at falsely high odds.

Does a player look physically or mentally tired or, perhaps, has been upset by a decision that might ruin their concentration? That could be the time to oppose them.

If you can quickly and accurately detect these factors and apply them to your live betting strategy then you stand to make a profit.

Conclusion

There are a wealth of factors to consider for tennis betting and, ultimately, only significant experience and understanding of each of the listed factors will teach you to become a successful tennis handicapper who consistently makes a profit.

Read as many blogs and tipster opinions as you can to discover angles that you might have missed. Take the time to research statistics that will inform your viewpoint. Devise a coherent staking strategy. Follow each of these rules and your tennis handicapping will soon improve and set you on the road to success.

Join DraftKings today

More about Online Betting

National Council on Problem Gambling 21+ Responsible Gambling 1-800-gambler