Guide
What you need to know about TI
On this page is plenty of helpful information and guidance on all of the key aspects of TennisInsight.com, or as we often call it, TI.
New to TennisInsight? Start here
Congratulations, you are now part of the internet’s savviest online community of serious tennis fans and punters, with access to a vast array of statistics and resources to help you get more out of your pro tennis experience. But before you jump in, here are a few pointers to ensure you get the most out of TennisInsight (and if you do punt, to get better punting returns):
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- Please take the time to read this guide carefully (it’s not too long) and should you have any questions do not hesitate to send us an email.
- If you plan on using our resources for tennis betting then please do so carefully. Tip:
The vast array of information here at TennisInsight can give you a sense of over-confidence. We have seen people join TI thinking they are about to make a fortune out of tennis betting only to quickly lose their cash. The trick is to take your time, get to know TI, its resources and the member community. In quick time you will start to see how best to utilise TI, what members you trust and want to follow, and how to incorporate this information into your betting decisions.
- If at any time you have a question, not only can you send us an email but you can also post questions to other users and TI Moderators who will be glad to help you out.
TennisInsight Values
Our ultimate goal is to provide an environment that does everything possible to help all members get more out of their pro tennis experience. For most users this means (hopefully) good betting profits but it also means a lot more. Tennis punting should be fun, so we appreciate some good humour along the way. We also think that it’s more interesting when you make your own betting decisions (using the communities resources as a guide of course!) This affords the opportunity for self learning, growth and development – which transcends all areas of your life. But enough on the philosophy, our values in a nutshell:
- Experiment & innovate
- Learn & grow
- Honesty & integrity
- Community & synergy
- Respect
We’re interested in having good Mods to help uphold positive user conduct instill the values of the site so please do get in contact with us if you would like to assist.
Community Rewards – Earning Membership for Your Insight
Did you know that TI offers membership time to the user community to reward User that make the biggest contribution?
Aces – the currency for TI rewards
The way you earn free membership time (and potentially cash) is by accruing Aces, which represent the ‘currency of TI’
Every TI user is able to award Aces to other users in appreciation of their contributions to the community.
We re-load everybody’s account with additional Aces each week. So please give them out and reward your fellow Tennis Insight fanatics with some love.
Like what you see? Give Aces, Cheer a Post
Aces are your way of acknowledging other TI users contributions in proportion to the value they contribute to your overall experience with TI and with betting in general. All users can accrue aces from fellow users by contributing their tips, analysis and in fact any information that fellow TI users may find useful.
You can award Aces by clicking into the User page and awarding them via the blue panel (on upper right hand side) or by Cheering a post – simply click on the Gold, Silver or Bronze icon adjacent a post to award that user 5, 3 or 1 Aces respectively.
In assessing the value of a fellow user there are many factors to consider. For example a highly successful tipster may go close to winning the overall TI earnings and yet contribute limited value (e.g. they might simply copy the tips of an established winning tipster, or they might always tip extremely late and thus offer little chance for others to benefit). Similarly insight and analysis may vary widely in it’s value – is it new insight or a repeated view? Is it helpful in forming a betting decision? Does the user that provided the insight have a good track record?
Hence aces are the great leveler – they let you ‘vote’ for the users you find most valuable. Imagine your aces were real money and you had to pay the TI populace in a way to encourage the best contributors to stay around. That is the intended use of sharing aces.
If you see a Post you like and you want to see more posts like it, then Cheer the Post
Your Insight: Tips on Submitting GREAT Insight
‘Your Insight’ lets you share your expert tennis knowledge with the rest of the TI community. Whilst there are plenty of chat rooms devoted to tennis, Your Insight is intended to be a little different and indeed far more useful. Our aim for Your Insight is to let tennis experts share useful knowledge in a contextual manner.
In order to achieve this aim, we ask you to make Your Insight contributions useful, contextual, and constructive.
Examples of useful information include:
- player quotes;
- information about player fitness, fatigue and injuries;
- observations about recent performances (or previous H2H performances) such as match stats or anything noteworthy;
- style of play and how it matches up to the opponent and/or the conditions;
- state of mind, motivation for the match;
- your analysis or preview of the match;
- your post-match assessment (you can add Your Insight to any historical match in our database);
- your analysis of the Insight Tennis Model prediction and why you think it may be valid or flawed; and
- any other information your fellow tennis enthusiasts will benefit from!
Your Insight posts are tied to a specific match. This contextual information means that as you navigate through recaps of historical matches you will be able to see comments that recreate the context under which those matches were played – which we hope will provide profound insight and learning to assist your tennis knowledge and punting acumen.
As statistical modellers and part-time gamblers we appreciate just how difficult it can be to predict tennis matches – so remember that while it is all too easy to criticise, we kindly ask you to make any criticism constructive!
Posting Guidelines and Code of Conduct
All users that contribute as part of the TI community are expected to do so in line with the values of TennisInsight.com as listed above and in accordance with our policies and guidelines as follows:
User Access levels
>> Free
Free users have limited access to the TI statistics and the Insight posted on the site. They may not make tips or give Aces to other Users.
>> Premium
Premium users get access to all aspects of the TI service and are granted the opportunity to make tips and contribute to Your Insight (and useful insight is always encouraged – no matter how often or rarely you would like to contribute). Premium users also have the ability to hand out Aces which play an important role in acknowledging valuable TI members (read more about aces below).
>> Champions
Champions (please email us if you have a better name) help TI with results and match statistics in order to keep the site as up to date as possible. This is particularly helpful for match stats so that a players current week averages can be displayed (see section on match stats). Champions receive 1 ace for entering a match result, 4 aces for entering match stats and 2 aces for verifying match stats submitted by another user – which helps ensure the accuracy of the data. Ideally these statistics would be provided in real time from another provider – however given the cost and integration issues we feel this is a nice solution. If you would like to be a champion user and help TI maintain the statistics then please drop us an email. Include some information about yourself and why you would make a good ‘champion’.
>> Moderators (Mods)
Moderators can contribute results and statistics just like champions. In addition Mods help uphold the values of the the site (see above). Moderators have the authority to delete posts and tips and to guide other users as to appropriate behaviour on TI.
We’re always looking for good Mods so if you would like to be a one please drop us an email and tell us why you would make a good ‘Mod’. Note that if you don’t post much – this is not a problem – we want users that access the site often and can offer some commitment to uphold/instill our values amongst the community.
Other ways to earn Aces – Tip Comps and Tournament Aces
With Aces being now worth something more than time on the site (which is quite valuable in itself) it is important that we ensure that Aces are given to the people that deserve it. Tennis Insight reserves the right to discount any allocations of Aces that it does not determine to be deserving or fairly earned.
There are three ways to earn Aces on TI:
- Win a tip comp (1st, 2nd or 3rd in $,ROI or %) and receive Aces based on the size of the tournament.
- Receive Aces from other Members through your Insight posts being cheered or through a gift directly on your User Profile page. Please note that from now on you may not give more than 100 Aces to any user each week. Any gift as such will be removed (and shortly this will be impossible).
- NEW FEATURE: Starting with the Australian Open 2016 we will be giving out bonus Aces to those Members that have supplied the most Insight within the Tournament. The amount of Aces will be inline with the amounts given out in the tip comp. We will use the Aces given on posts to ascertain the top Members. So start giving those Aces out to your favourite posts!
Approximate Aces given out for each Tournament are as follows:
- Grand Slams: 10k Aces
- Masters/Premiers: 4k Aces
- ATP/WTA: 1k Aces
- CH/ITF: 500 Aces.
Note: these totals are loosely based on prize-money ranges.
Tipsters
TI users may tip on all matches covered by TI with a limit of one tip per match.
In cases of incomplete matches TI voids the tips. In cases of player replacements TI will typically void all tips. However if the replacement occurs sufficiently early then TI may allow tips (and would delete any tips made prior to the player replacement, if applicable).
POLICY ON DELETING TIPS
Occasionally users may request a Moderator to delete their tip, and this is subject to the following:
Generally, deleting tips should NOT be permitted.
Rationale: It’s not really fair to place a tip, and then change/delete it because you have changed your mind or become aware of information after the fact.
Do not post a tip that has more than 2 digits after the Decimal point of the stake. This leads to false stake display of the sum of the accepted bets on every match on the site and this will lead to deleting your tip and being asked to tip again. (Example – $1.23 instead of $1.2345)
Exceptions: Tips made in error (you will need to request a deletion within ~30 minutes of placing the tip, or there must be clear evidence that the tip was made in error, e.g. if it is accompanied by a post showing a clear intent to support the other player). Other exceptions include tips with matches involving player replacements and that sort of stuff.
Odds feed
TI relies on an XML odds feed from Pinnacle to provide indicative bookmaker prices as well as match start times. Note that TI modifies the odds feed slightly so as to attempt to price to a 100% book. This is because our feed comes from a single sportsbook and sometimes better prices are available elsewhere, so this is a fairer system for our tipsters.
The feed generally excludes challenger and ITF matches and will have limited coverage of Davis/Fed Cup.
From time to time the feed may ‘drop out’ or we may miss the feed for particular matches. If this is the case then please let us know and we will endeavor to fix.
Note that TI adopts the start time as used in the odds feed & will not accept tips made after this time has elapsed (even if the match has not yet started). This ensures no post-tipping (apart from the help of moderators we few controls against post-tipping for matches not associated with the feed).
Tipping percentage
TI earnings, ROI & tipping percentage only accrue for matches in which a bookmaker price is recorded. If TI does not have odds for a match then it will not count towards earnings (unless we add the match odds in at a later date).
Post-tipping & suspending accounts
Post-tipping is possible on matches for which no starting time (and no odds) is marked. Users are expected to only ever tip before a match starts. Any abuse of this will result in account suspension. If you detect other users post-tipping please email us immediately.
Using Tipsters and Earnings to help your betting
You can follow the top tipsters and earners and use as a valuable guide in making your bets. But before blindly following another tipster beware that odds assigned for tips typically reflect the last odds available before a match starts. This could disadvantage some tipsters (and advantage others) that make their tip well before the market closes as available odds may have changed significantly. Also, as explained above not all tips count in TI earnings.
In the long run these sorts of factors should even out and overall TI earnings should give a very good reflection of a tipsters actual effectiveness.
Bankroll
To encourage the sharing of tennis knowledge and help discover the best tipsters we’ve developed a new system for tipping on matches on TI.
The system will allow consistently great tippers to reach the top of the leaderboards!
All users start with an initial Bankroll of $2000 for tipping on the site.
Users can make as many tips as they like up to $1000 per match total including all tip types.
You can only tip as much as your current Bankroll balance will allow.
Users with a balance below $2000 will be topped back up to $2000 every week on Sunday morning (Insight time).
- 2 Euro = 1,000BR
- 4 Euro = 2,000BR
- 8 Euro = 5,000BR
- 16 Euro = 12,000BR
- 24 Euro = 20,000BR
- 50 Euro = 50,000BR
ATP & WTA Match database
TennisInsight.com contains all Main Tour and Challenger results (including qualifying) along with certain exhibition results for the ATP Tour dating back to January 2000. For WTA our database contains all Main Tour and ITF results of $25K or higher (including qualifying) along with certain exhibition results dating back to January 2003.
TI Model and related stats
Understanding Ratings and Handle
Who is going to win? Will it be a close Match? How do the players compare? As any regular tennis fan knows the ATP Rankings and Seedings are often a poor good guide to answering these sorts of questions. Instead, recovering corrupt fbk files the space occupied by the deleted files is marked as available for new data to be written over it. What we need is an evaluation of form – assessments of just how well each player is playing – and that’s where the Insight Tennis Model comes into play.
>> Insight Tennis Model
The Insight Tennis Model combines fundamental statistical techniques with a deep knowledge of tennis to produce a sophisticated analysis of player form. In line with any fundamental statistical investigation the outputs of the model describe the mean (Ratings) and the variation (Handle) as described below.
>> Ratings
The Insight Tennis Model assigns numerical ratings to each player based on a statistical assessment of their match results over time. The ratings typically range anywhere from -5 up to +5 or even higher. The rating values have no inherent meaning, however when Comparing Players the difference in Match Rating between the two players represents the average number of Service Games that separate them in a set of tennis. Note that this is a long-term average prediction so for example if we rated Rafael Nadal 2 games better than his opponent we would expect that as more sets of tennis were played the average score line will tend toward a 2-game advantage to Nadal.
>> Match Rating versus Surface Rating
As you browse through TennisInsight.com you will notice that both Match Ratings and Surface Ratings are displayed – so what’s the difference? Simply put, Surface Ratings assess the underlying form of a player for the given playing surface. Factors such as win-loss record and the quality of previous opposition are taken into account when calculating Surface Ratings. Alternatively Match Ratings assess form specific to the current tournament conditions and the opposing player (Match Ratings now take H2H into account).
For every single match result the Match Rating of each player is displayed in brackets immediately after the players name (along with the players rank at the time of the match).
>> Getting a handle on it!
Assigning a statistical rating to each Player is easy with the Insight Tennis Model. But how much credibility can we give to that Rating? As stated above the Ratings are assessed based on match results over time, hence the more Matches played and the more recently those matches were played, the greater handle we have on our statistical assessment.
Equivalent to Confidence Interval, Handle values on TennisInsight.com range from zero (“no handle”) to 1 (“as much handle as can be”) with values less than 0.5 considered poor. In this case the predicted form rating is considered speculative and the player’s ‘true’ form may be significantly different from the Insight Tennis Model rating.
In our Match Previews we display the highest Surface rating for the given surface ever achieved for that player. In this instance these ratings are tied a handle value of greater than 0.5.
>> Predicted Chance and Minimum Buy-In
Based on the Ratings and Handles for each player, a combined statistic is calculated that gives an estimate of the chance of either player to win the match. This is shown as a range (a confidence interval) – the better Handle we have on each player, the smaller the range.
The minimum buy-in is simply the reciprocal of the Models minimum estimated chance for each player and represents the lowest price at which you would bet if you went purely off the Model Rating.
>> How do you derive “Max Ratings” for each surface?
Maximum Ratings are updated weekly and represent the highest ever Rating achieved on a given surface where the Handle is 0.5 or higher.
Other Statistics at TennisInsight.com
>> The x-Factor
In the Activity and Stats sections of a Player Profile or Match Preview you will notice ‘Avg X’ and ‘Avg Delta’, here is everything you need to know to interpret these stats:
<> The Insight Tennis Model assigns a statistically rated score (X-score) for every player for every match. These scores form the basis for calculating the Ratings discussed above and they are also presented on the site to give further insight into how the players are performing.
“Avg x” is a straight-line average of a given set of x-scores. This simple value can be particularly useful when looking at how a player typically performs in certain conditions – for example on a given surface, versus top 10 players, or in any of the conditions that may be selected in the activity filter.
“Avg 
” is simply the difference between actual and predicted performance. Players with a positive Avg are typically outperforming the the Insight Tennis Model’s expectations for the given set of matches.
>> Court Speed
In the Tournament Profiles section you will notice we display a statistical assessment of court speed. Generally, matches on faster courts have fewer points, more games and more tie breakers. “Court speed” is thus inferred from completed match results and whilst not a true measure of how quickly the court is playing it does provide some useful insight on this.
(this statistic is currently not available)
>> Updating Match Ratings
There was a time when we displayed retrospectively updated ratings after the match. This is no longer the case. In other words, when you browse through completed matches, the Ratings displayed are the predicted ratings determined ahead of the match.
>> Big Servers
“Big Servers” is one of the filter options when looking at player activity. Without actually knowing real data of player serve speeds, we use a simple statistical assessment based on the average length of sets played. This is based on the premise that big serving players are more likely to be involved in longer sets, which is clearly not always the case. We like to think of this stat as showing players with a high dependency on their serve. They don’t get broken often, but also do not break serve often and hence have a reliance on serving effectively to win matches.
(this statistic is currently not available)
Match Stats
You can find match stats on the match preview, player and tournament pages. The stats are presented as averages and often on a ‘per game’ basis. This allows for easy, side by side comparison (be aware that the ‘per game’ calculation omits tiebreakers and are thus ‘per service game’. We have given this much thought and concluded that this is the fairest way to perform the calculations).
Savvy users can get a lot out of the match stats:
- You can filter the match stats by duration. This is great for showing stats in the current week (or fortnight) so you can see exactly how they players are performing in the current tournament
- You can filter the match stats by draw (main draw only, qualifying only or both). By default match stats are presented for main draw only. Including all rounds when you compare two players works especially well in the current week when a qualifier is involved
- You can filter the match stats by surface
- When comparing players you can filter for player comparision or for H2H matches only
- All filters can be applied concurrently, so for example you could filter to see match stats for matches between Fed and Nadal, on clay court, within the past year
- Use the tournament page to get a great feel for how the court is playing in the current year. i.e. Aces per game, hold% and tie break frequency all give a good sense of how quickly the court is playing
Match Stats Leaders
Tour Match Stats Leaders are available here. These are updated weekly at the conclusion of the prior weeks tournaments.
Current Tournament Match Stats Leaders are available within the Tournament profile area eg. Rolland Garros 2020. These are updated as Stats for each individual match in the current week is captured, i.e. multiple times a day.
The Match Stats Leaders covers both the Men’s & Women’s tours. You can customise the leaders using a range of criteria, for example time span, surface, tour, main draw vs. qualifying.
Stats are based only on matches for which Match Stats have been captured. This typically covers ATP, Challenger & WTA matches, including qualifiers.
The Stats are sortable for each category – additional clicks on the category heading toggles between descending and ascending sort orders
The Leaderboards are typically based on a minimum of 3 matches played unless otherwise stated.
Match stats database
Match stats are difficult to get, especially for the current week where the only source is typically the official Flash scoreboard. But Flash does not allow for the stats to be automatically captured. The only method we are aware of is to data enter the stats via our ScoreSheet module.
Hence we need more champions! If you find the match stats useful and want to help out then please get in touch. By sharing the load with a swag of other users the effort required by an individual is minimal – 10 minutes in a week makes a huge difference. Of course we want accurate stats so please only get in touch if you are a ‘numbers’ person. Enable File History for Easy Recovery
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Also note that each week we do a sweep of the match stats from other service providers. This helps ensure the accuracy of our match stats database.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have a question not covered above, or in the following FAQs, please drop us an email and if it’s a good one we’ll add it here!
Q: How can I distribute Aces to other users?
A: You can award Aces by Cheering a post. Click on the heart icon of a post to give that user 5 aces.
Q: Why should I distribute Aces to other users?
A: Aces are your way of recognising others contributions to the community and encouraging them to keep participating. Aces have genuine monetary value, because at the end of each TI period they are tallied up and then bonus membership time is awarded out to these users in direct proportion to Aces earned.
Q: Are the Odds displayed in the player activity the opening or closing lines?
A: Closing lines
Q: What does the “+$65 ROI:+0.7% 61%” next to a User’s post mean?
A: This is the User’s Earnings, Return on Investment (or ‘Profit on Turnover’) and Tip Win % for the current rolling quarter (90 days).
Q: How do I place a tip?
A: Click on a Match Preview, click “Add YOUR INSIGHT” and then follow the prompts.
Q: Do Tipsters have an unlimited bankroll?
A: Not anymore. The Bankroll system (2015) gives each Tipster a starting balance and a weekly top up to tip with. You can then pay for extra Bankroll of needed. See the bankroll guide above.
Q: What determines which posts go into the “Top Insight” page?
A: Any post that has been Cheered (refer above) is included in Top Insight.
Q: Is there a search for other Users?
A: Yes! The search box at the top of the page will find Users, Players, Tournaments and Blog posts.
Q: I would like to access the TI Data directly. How can I do so?
A: We are currently trialing out an API that can be used to access the TI stats through a programming interface such as an VB within Excel or PHP. If you are keen to give it a try then let us know and we can send you the details. Currently we have commands for getting a list of Players, Tournaments, Matches, Match Stats and Match Stats Leaders.