How to Bet on Tennis

How to bet on tennis starts with the simplest market there is: two players, two prices, no draw. Put £10 on a 1.40 favourite, they win, and you collect £14. From there tennis gets more interesting, because you can bet on how the match goes as well as who wins it: the set score, a handicap on games, the total number of games. Before any of that, though, learn the one rule that catches people out, which is what happens when a player retires hurt.

How to bet on tennis: the main markets

Match winner. Turn both prices into percentages and they’ll add up to slightly more than 100%. At 1.40 and 3.00 it’s 71.4% plus 33.3%, roughly 104.7%, so the bookmaker keeps around 4.5%. Feed both prices into the CasinoCalcs no-vig calculator to see the fair odds without it.

Set betting. You’re calling the exact score in sets, so 2-0, 2-1, 1-2 or 0-2 in a best of three. Prices are bigger because you’re predicting how close it’ll be as well as the winner.

Game handicap. The favourite starts a few games behind, for example −4.5. Win 6-3, 6-2 and that’s 12 games to 5, a margin of seven, so the −4.5 bet wins and +4.5 on the underdog loses. It’s a neat way to turn a mismatch into something close to an even-money bet.

Total games. You pick over or under a line, say 21.5. A tight match with a tiebreak sails over; a 6-2, 6-1 thrashing doesn’t get near it. Big servers on grass hold serve more, which pushes totals up.

The retirement rule

Football doesn’t get abandoned because the striker’s hamstring went. Tennis matches end that way all the time. Bookmakers deal with it in different ways. Some void every match bet, some pay the player who goes through as long as a set was finished, and some settle once a single ball has been struck. Set and totals markets often only stand if they were already decided when the player stopped. Check your bookie’s rule before betting, and especially when a player turns up strapped.

Combining tennis bets

Early rounds at a big tournament are full of short-priced favourites, and the temptation is to string them together. Five players at 1.20 multiply to 2.49, a nice-looking price. Then do the other sum: five 83% chances together come in only around 40% of the time, and you’ve paid the margin five times over. The acca calculator shows what it returns and the implied probability calculator what it’s really likely to do. If you think a match will be tighter than the odds say, the handicap calculator helps you find the line.

Five favourites is not a sure thing. BeGambleAware.org has free support if betting stops being fun.