October 23, 2015

Tennis Handicap Betting Preview – Friday 23rd October by @Tennisratings

ATP Moscow – Quarter-Finals – Teymuraz Gabashvili vs Evgeny Donskoy

This week’s events reach the quarter-final stage and I’m looking at the match third on court in Moscow, at around 4:30pm UK time today, to get us up to two from two successful handicap betting recommendations this week.

Yesterday saw a relatively straightforward win for us with Jeremy Chardy getting the better of the Argentine clay-courter, Federico Delbonis, and in today’s preview we assess the all-Russian clash between Teymuraz Gabashvili and Evgeny Donskoy.

Gabashvili has had a facile route to this stage, with a routine straight sets win over the Turkish wild-card, Cem Ilkel, who is not even close to Challenger level, and a better win based on starting prices over Viktor Troicki, who looks like he can’t wait for the season to end.  Donkey’s route was – based on SPs – tougher, and he has achieved superb straight set victories over Borna Coric and Ricardas Berankis, both as underdog.

In addition, it’s worth pointing out that Donskoy has performed reasonably in this tournament before, gaining four underdog wins in the last three years, and taking sets from both Marin Cilic and Richard Gasquet in defeat.  In fact, he’s taken at least a set in every match he’s played at this event from 2012 onwards (seven matches).

My model priced this up quite differently to the current market prices.  At the time of writing, Gabashvili is available at around 1.57, which seems ludicrously short given that he has very little record whatsoever to boast about on hard or indoor hard (he has held serve 74.5% and broken opponents 21.4%, combined 95.9%)  My model agreed with this assertion, pricing him as a 2.03 underdog.  Interestingly, in the five times since January 2014 that my model has made Gabashvili’s opponent over 4% implied value in non-first round matches, they have won on every occasion.

Reasons for this discrepancy are likely to focus on two areas.  Firstly the market over-reacting to Gabashvili’s win over the higher-ranked, but out of form Troicki, and a 3-0 head to head record in his favour over Donskoy.  However the first meeting came in 2008 when Donskoy was 18 years of age, and ranked 689 in the world – therefore totally irrelevant – and in the latter matchup this year in the Karshi Challenger, Donskoy was injured and retired in the first set.  On this basis it’s tough to argue that the head to head record deserves any weight whatsoever.

Donskoy has an excellent record in the last 12 months as a starting price underdog priced between 2.00 and 2.99, winning 50% (9/18) of his matches.  Quite incredibly, he’s taken at least a set in 15 of 17 of these completed matches, and allied to his track record here in Moscow of also doing so, this has to be recommended today.

Tennis Handicap Betting Recommendation: Back Evgeny Donskoy +1.5 sets at 1.65

Prices correct at time of writing.

By @Tennisratings.

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