Tennis is a strange sport in that players can choose to retire from a Tournament.  Are they really injured that badly?  The tournament may not have enough kudos and bowing out under the cloud of injury incurs no shame.  Perhaps the injury is not severe but they don’t want it to get worse before a bigger tournament.

ATP players in particular tend to show increased odds in there next tournament after a retirement.   This can represent value and also represents a good trading opportunity.  If the following criteria a met it’s worth trading these matches.

• the player retires from a less important tournament with lower match fees. 
• the player is out injured for less than 4 weeks.
• the next match or matches are against a lesser opponent.
• the injury is no serious.

When investigating the injury find out the details.  The Australian Open for example produced an above average number of retirees.  Players struggled in the intense heat but it doesn’t mean they’ll the same problem in subsequent tournament.

Some players seem to retire more often than others – Mikhail Youzhny, for example, retired four times since the start of the 2013 season and has done so three times in 12 matches since October, whilst Michael Russell has done so six times since the start of the 2013 season.

The following are examples of when a player has retired and the odds may have moved into value territory in the next match.

▶ Andy Murray was 1.14 against Nicolas Mahut at Queens, 3 weeks after retiring against Marcel Granollers with a back injury.

▶ Jarkko Nieminen was 1.56 against Bjorn Phau in Sydney (winning 6-0 6-1) after he retired the previous week with a migraine.

▶ Horacio Zeballos beat Martin Fischer in Kitzbuhel priced 2.59 after retiring with a stomach muscle problem the previous week, and then retired when losing 6-0 2-0 in the next round.

▶ Alex Bogomolov Jr beat Neil Pauffley (World Rank 438 at the time) in qualifying at Eastbourne priced 1.24 after retiring with a chest infection the previous week.

▶ Michael Russell beat Hiroki Moriya when priced 2.17 in qualifying for Tokyo after retiring the previous week with a knee injury.

▶ Sorana Cirstea beat Sharon Fichman when priced 1.36 after retiring the week before.

This is another method to select matches worth trading.  Helping to increase the chance of making high probability tennis trades on Betfair.  For more tennis strategies visit the tennis trading section.