Thursday, 21 December 2023

Day 7 bets

Another seed falls yesterday, don't say we didn't warn you this might happen. Obviously Littler's made the market go bonkers (he's now trading at a shorter price to win the whole thing than I took for him to make the quarters in the week before the tournament started), kid is special but he's not single digits to bink the tournament special. Let's go through today's bets, we get round one in the books in the afternoon then it's round two all the way. Or at least all the way until we get to round three...

Mansell/Zong - Can we get another Asian player pulling off a big upset? I mean it's a possibility, Zong has talent and Mickey, although he's had a good season, isn't the strongest opponent he could have faced. 9/2 might be a tad unkind, but I don't think it's likely unkind by much, as there's big questions as to how good Zong's peak game is, how often he achieves it, and whether it's good enough to hang with Mansell over a best of five set match. Certainly not interested in the Cyclone at 1/5.

Woodhouse/van Peer - Another one where we're looking at the underdog. Luke's the better player, don't think anyone is going to doubt that one, but is he that much better that he should be a 2/5 favourite? I'm not so sure - I can't find a single sample where Woodhouse is over 60% to take the match, and over shorter samples it actually gets closer to 50/50 - albeit there Berry runs into both sample size and consistency issues. While I've still got a lot of confidence in Woody's game, I'm also somewhat of a believer in Berry, and think he's clearly got much better than the 30% or so chance that the line implies, so will take the small shot, 0.1u van Peer 5/2

Razma/de Decker - Mike looked good in round one, and Madars has looked pretty ordinary for a seeded player all year, I think the combination of the two is making for an ever so slightly off line, favouring the Belgian a bit too much. It's nowhere near enough that we'd consider taking the 11/8 on Razma, but varying samples give this at only around 50% to 55% chances for de Decker, it's not off by enough to bet for sure, but it's not one we're looking at in a "take favourites lol" acca or anything like that.

Cross/Tricole - On the other hand, this is one which we can reasonably set and forget I think. Rob's probably not in the top two or three players in the world, but he's in that bunch that is not far behind who absolutely should be in the equation for winning titles, while Thibault is good, but right now just a guy at this sort of level and looked distinctly average in round one, play like that again and this could be done in no more than eleven or twelve legs. This looks like a mid 90% sort of match for Rob - if you've got money on 888 and can access their 1/9 line, that seems like an incredibly safe investment, but I don't normally list bets that are only available on obscure books, and when we get to the 1/11 on Betfred it becomes a question of how much of an edge do we really have chasing single figure ROI's.

Gilding/Littler - This feels like it should be an automatic bet on Gilding simply based on the amount of steam that there's been on Luke in the past 24 hours, and year long this looks like the simplest bet of the year. That said, I'm not going to do it for a couple of reasons - firstly, if we pull back to shorter samples, Littler becomes a lot closer to a two in three favourite, rather than a fairly small favourite. Secondly, there's every reason to think that Luke in the past month or two is outplaying his seasonal stats by quite some distance. Certainly have no interest in Luke at 1/4, and I don't hate the concept of taking Gilding at better than 3/1, it's just hard to gauge with how much things have moved recently what edge, if any, we actually have.

Noppert/Williams - This one however is less complicated to look at, year long Noppie's just more than a two in three sort of shot, ticking up over 70% as we get to varying smaller samples. Scott was pretty much par for the course in round one, so there's no reason to think that anything's going to be hugely out of line and the 5/2 line is right in the sort of range that our projections are seeing.

Clemens/Leung - This is another one where we need to decide how much the line has shifted based off of one match, and do we consider it an overreaction and take the seed. Leung looked fantastic in his first round game, and it moves the season long stats to giving him a touch more than a one in three chance against Clemens. That isn't really the sort of thing I was expecting to see, and the sample is still small, but I think there's enough evidence there to suggest that taking Clemens at 1/3 is not a sensible play, even if Leung being as short a price as he is doesn't look tasty either.

Heta/Lukeman - Seems like a fairly trivial one to analyse, year long stats put Damon at just around a 70% shot, so the 4/9 line appears about right. As you get to shorter samples, Martin's game picks up a bit and may give you marginal value at 2/1, but I can't say I saw anything outstanding in the first round to tip the balance towards taking a small punt on Lukeman.

Will get up a couple of days worth of match reviews and then punts for the last two days of round two later this evening.

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