TENNIS NEWS – DAVIS CUP RESULTS,TIED AT ONE TO GREAT BRITAIN, ONE TO BELGIUM, DOUBLES ON SATURDAY IN GHENT, AND THE ARENA CHARGES TO PEE?

Written by: Staff on 27th November 2015

TENNIS NEWS - DAVIS CUP RESULTS,TIED AT ONE TO GREAT BRITAIN, ONE TO BELGIUM, DOUBLES ON SATURDAY IN GHENT, AND THE ARENA CHARGES TO PEE?

epa05044813 Britain's Andy Murray in action against Belgium's Ruben Bemelmans during the second match of the Davis Cup World Group Final between Belgium and Britain in Gent, Belgium, 27 November 2015. EPA/LAURENT DUBRULE |

* Britain comes close to making it 2-0 in Davis Cup — but not quite.

DAVIS CUP FINALS

If you’re wondering — yes, you would have known that this was Kyle Edmund’s first Davis Cup tie. He served first, and looked nervous; he had to survive two break points (and six deuces) to hold in the first game of his match with David Goffin. But, after that, it was Goffin who looked bad — so bad, frankly, that we wondered if he was sick, although he didn’t seem to be working with the trainer. Edmund quickly went up two sets to none. Not a good sign for Belgium, given that Goffin had never come back from two sets down.

The flip side is, Edmund had only played six best-of-five matches in his career, and only won one of them (at Roland Garros this year). Edmund had played brilliantly for two sets, but he couldn’t maintain that level. Goffin had little trouble clawing it back to 2-2. And Edmund never seemed to recover. Goffin earned his first come-from-two-sets-down win, and the first point, 3-6 1-6 6-2 6-1 6-0.

There really isn’t much to say about the second match. Andy Murray beat Ruben Bemelmans 6-3 6-2 7-5, and we’re even. Except for the scoreline in the first match, everything so far is really going according to the script.

We still don’t really know who will play doubles for Belgium. There has been talk of putting Goffin in the doubles, but he doesn’t play doubles. Ever, really. Playing him would be a big gamble, especially given that he’ll need rest if he is to have any chance against Murray in the reverse singles. Admittedly the Belgians don’t have any really good alternatives. They have an awfully tough assignment in any case, because they’re supposed to play the Murray brothers. And Andy has shown quite clearly that he wants this win. Our gut strategic feeling, or rather our guess as to the probabilities, is that Belgium’s best chance is to save Goffin, hope he can beat Murray, and then wait for Edmund to crack in the fifth match.

Belgium’s David Goffin returns the ball to Britain’s Kyle Edmund during the first game of the final of the Davis Cup World Group between Belgium and Great Britain in Gent, Belgium, 27 November 2015. EPA/LAURENT DUBRULE

10sBalls_com – Editors Note : We think @rubenbemelmans will be playing the dubs with Steve Darcis On Sat. against The Murray Brothers…. But Global Chick and Ros both said the arena is set up nicely for TV. But the Internet in media is very slow. The televisions flicker and the toilets for the public are not free ? How do you charge 50c to pee ? Even handicapped people? Wow for this to be a BNP Paribas event this shocks us. They don’t sell beer there … They RENT IT !!!Friday was a double singles session with 2 three out of five set matches and you need to pay to pee ? Really. They make their money twice ….No ? Shameful.

THINK ABOUT ALL THIS ( Or Not )

This Davis Cup final is unusual in that both teams managed to recruit their best possible teams. Of course, it helps that both nations have only one top player (Andy Murray for the British and David Goffin for the Belgians); it’s generally easier to get lower-ranked players. The flip side is, if more nations had gotten their best available teams, odds are that we wouldn’t be seeing the teams we will see this week. So, even as we’re preparing for the Davis Cup final, we’re running across the usual tennis articles bemoaning the lack of participation in tennis’s oldest international competition, such as David Lloyd’s ( he rarely knows the score ) claim that Andy Murray hasn’t done enough for Britain. (Apparently hauling a team to the final effectively alone isn’t sufficient!)

At a time when we were reading (or, mostly, not reading) those, we were also working on problems in game theory, the mathematical discipline devoted to finding best strategies for solving particular problems. Which naturally set us to thinking. Is there a way to increase Davis Cup participation? To answer this, we have to look at the costs and benefits of playing.

What are the rewards for a player playing Davis Cup? We can think of three, actual or potential:

1. The chance to support one’s country and/or win the Cup itself

2. The chance to earn points

3. The chance to earn an Olympic berth

The penalty of Davis Cup participation is the risk of injury and fatigue.

We could try to model how each player decides whether to play Davis Cup based on these four factors. We doubt this would prove very interesting or very successful. But what we can say with certainty is that, in order to increase player participation, we must either increase the rewards or decrease the costs.

(Those who come at this from a behaviorist psychological model may recognize this idea in their own discipline: to increase the rewards is to add more reinforcement; to decrease the cost is to reduce punishment.)

Decreasing injury and fatigue problems can be done only by decreasing either the number or the length of matches. Next year will bring one such small change — the introduction of fifth set tiebreaks — but only a few matches last that long. Really, the problem is that there are so many best-of-five matches. There are ways to reduce the total, but all involve fiddling with the format. The ITF has shown great resistance to this.

So can we increase the rewards? Or, alternately, can we increase the perception of the rewards?

There isn’t much we can do about the nationalistic motives of #1. These are, quite simply, idiosyncratic and can’t be legislated — and they can vary depending on what a particular player has or hasn’t achieved, as (e.g.) Roger Federer’s interest in Davis Cup seems to have declined now that he has won it.

The award of points, in #2, is also beyond us — recall that the ATP has shown a willingness to yank Davis Cup (and Olympic) points. The difficulty, as we have pointed out in the past, is that awarding big points for Davis Cup is simply unfair, for two reasons. First, one’s results are not dependent on one’s own performance. This should be a deal-breaker in and of itself, but somehow it hasn’t been. But the other reason why it’s not reasonable is that anything that carries enough points to matter must be open to all. Davis Cup is not — even if your team is in the later stages of the Cup, the coach may decide you are not wanted on the team. Or you may be from a nation like France or Spain that is very deep, and find yourself ranked high enough to get into any regular tournament but not high enough within your national ranks to get on the Davis Cup team. For these reasons, Davis Cup cannot be given really big points, and cannot be made a required event. There must always be alternatives — the current alternative being playing a 500 point event, which awards the same or better points for a lot less effort and requires that effort in only one week rather than throughout the year. Possibly there are incentives that could be offered — “Play Davis Cup and you get to count one more other event” — but these are tricky.

So odds are that we must focus our attention on item #3, the chance to earn an Olympic berth. This one is already gathering some attention — the Davis Cup organizers want to require more ties of the players to earn their Olympic spots. Our suspicion is that this will decrease, not increase, Davis Cup participation, because it will make the effort of qualifying too great for the reward. Players want to play the Olympics — far more than they want to play Davis Cup — but the cost of participating can’t be set impossibly high.

Why? This is where game theory comes in. It’s something formally called the “Discount Factor,” and usually denoted by a lower case Greek delta (δ). An informal name for the idea is “the shadow of the future.”

The discount factor tells you how much a future reward is worth to you today. For example, which would you rather have, ten dollars today or eleven dollars a year from now? If those two are equally attractive to you, you have an annual discount factor of about 89% (89% of $11 is about $10). Which would you rather have, $10 today or $20 ten years from now? If those two are equally valuable, that gives a ten year discount factor of 50%.

Now look at it from a player’s standpoint: We see a lot of Davis Cup participation in the year before the Olympics, because the players get immediate payoff. The year before that, the participation is much lower. We don’t have exact statistics on this, and can’t gather them (since we don’t know who volunteered for Davis Cup but was turned down), but it is clear that, for the players, the discount rate represents a big mark-down.

And this, it is important to note, produces a lot of selfish behavior. Back in 1984, the famous mathematician and interdisciplinary economist Robert Axelrod published his book The Evolution of Cooperation, which examined the circumstances in which two parties can cooperate in a game called Prisoner’s Dilemma. This work proved to be very important in everything from economics to international relations to zoology, but the basic result is quite simple: two parties will ordinarily cooperate only if they encounter each other a lot and if the discount rate isn’t too low. (That is, they’re more likely to cooperate if the discount rate is 90%, meaning not much discounting, than if it’s 10%, meaning a tremendous amount of discounting.) Davis Cup certainly fulfills the first of these conditions, about the repeated encounters — it’s mostly the same players forming a team year after year. It’s the second one that is the problem.

Is there a solution? The discount factor is, like the value of nationalism, somewhat personal and idiosyncratic. It is hard to manipulate directly. But if you can give more immediate gratification, the discount factor will be less of a concern. One proposal we’ve made is to have an Olympic Festival every year. Qualification would be based on Olympic rules. The points would be equivalent to the Olympics. You could build it into the schedule every year, so that the Olympics wouldn’t mess things up so much. Suddenly, you have a big event and a big motivation — and the discount factor would be much smaller. The incentive for Davis Cup goes up substantially.

This isn’t the perfect solution. It isn’t the only approach, either. For example, you could give more value to Davis Cup participation in the early years of an Olympic cycle — for instance, require fully ten tie-equivalents to qualify for the Olympics, but a tie in year one is worth four, in year two is worth three, in year two is worth two, and in year one is worth one. Or something like that; we haven’t worked the math on this — it is, after all, unfair to younger players.

There are doubtless other ideas. The key is very simple: Make sure the discount factor isn’t an issue and you’ll get more participation.

RANKINGS

Estimated ATP World Tour Rankings

As of November 27, 2015

Rank &

Prior…Player………..Points

1..(1) Djokovic……….16585

2..(2) Murray………….8670

3..(3) Federer…………8340

4..(4) Wawrinka………..6900

5..(5) Nadal…………..5230

6..(6) Berdych…………4620

7..(7) Ferrer………….4305

8..(8) Nishikori……….4235

9..(9) Gasquet…………2850

10.(10) Tsonga………….2635

11.(11) Isner…………..2495

12.(12) Anderson………..2475

13.(13) Cilic…………..2405

14.(14) Raonic………….2170

15.(15) Simon…………..2145

16.(16) Goffin………….1805

17.(17) Lopez…………..1690

18.(18) Tomic…………..1675

19.(19) Paire…………..1633

20.(20) Thiem…………..1600

21.(21) Fognini…………1515

22.(22) Monfils…………1510

23.(23) Troicki…………1487

24.(24) Karlovic………..1485

25.(25) Bautista Agut……1480

26.(26) Sock……………1465

27.(27) Garcia-Lopez…….1430

28.(28) Dimitrov………..1360

28.(29) Seppi…………..1360

30.(30) Kyrgios…………1260

SCORES

Davis Cup – Final

Belgium hosts Great Britain (Indoor Clay)

Friday: Tied 1-1

David Goffin def. Kyle Edmund 3-6 1-6 6-2 6-1 6-0

Andy Murray def. Ruben Bemelmans 6-3 6-2 7-5

Content Via Bob Larson Tennis News

Topics: Atp, Belgium, Davis Cup Finals, Ghent, Great Britain, Men's tennis, Sports, Tennis News

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November 27, 2015 at 7:27 pm

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November 27, 2015 at 7:36 pm

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