I have no idea how to figure this out mathematically, but I'm sure it can be done if you assume each player has a 50% chance of winning each game. After the 5th game, its first to win 2 games in a row wins the set, right? So it must go (A B A B A B.... or B A B A B A...) for it to continue all the way up to 59. Anyone got an idea of how to figure it out?
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you have to model this with a stochastic matrix, and no it wouldn't be 50/50. The guy from UGeorgia is ranked 23rd and the frenchman is unranked.
I'm not going to have a go at it but remember that the odds are better than that would suggest bc in men's tennis servers win ~80% of the time so there is a better chance that you will get the ABABAB sequencing (80% A, then 80% B rather than 50% A, then 50% B)
Ok well disregarding the skill levels of the two players, I understand how the server does have an advantage. I'm not a tennis follower, so I didn't realize the server would have about an 80% of winning. Gotcha. So i guess its not as impressive as i thought it could be.
It's even more of a serving advantage for isner. I would say closer to about 90 percent and up. With the way the other guy is serving I give him about 85% but towards the end he was holding with far greater ease than Isner.
Serve is hugely decisive in men's tennis...in this match so far the french player has only had one BREAK POINT in the entire match, which he converted. Think about that...he only had one point with a chance to break serve (not counting the tiebreaker) in 500+ points played.
10 sigma!
well there is some messy probability the set will go to 5-5, and then after that isn't it just p^108 + (1-p)^108 chance of getting to 54-54 after that, where p = prob. of server winning a game? This is because there are only 2 possible sequences of wins:
ABABABAB... and BABABABA...
the first sequence results when the server wins the first game, and the second sequence results when the receiver wins the first game.
i wonder how many (few) non-tiebreaker 5th sets have ever been played at a major tournament...that just makes today even more ridiculous
the likelihood of this happening is 1 in every tennis match that has ever been played
ESPN Magazine ran an article last issue about the probability of seeing all the rare events in sports. Worst probability was seeing someone score 7 goals in an NHL game (last done in 1920) at around 1 in 42,000. There are a lot more tennis matches that occur than hockey games I would assume, and considering this has never happened before I would have to think the odds are worse than that.
I don't think people in this thread, for the most part, grasp how INSANE this was. The last set alone was significantly longer than any FULL MATCH ever played. This is unparalelled and will likely never occur again in our lifetimes.
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