Hi imoen,

Thanks so much, I'll let my site mod know.

Thanks again.

lol Sheddie. That's part of what the pickem's all about. The results so far are up on http://www.britishtennis.net/competitions.html by the way. Count's got somethig to smile about

ouch - 201 too: not my best set of preditctions . at how Billy the bookie's doing.

-- Edited by RobC at 11:44, 2008-01-14

I *think* so but it might take Steven a while to get it up as he's pretty busy. (i would do it but I have absolutely no idea how to, all I really do is copy and paste stuff )

and yes, you're right the bookies do seem to have an uncanny ability to predict the upsets

Count Zero wrote:

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Sheddie 201 Da Count 13

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How things can change! After 3/4 of today's matches, Da Count is down 32 at 50 = and sheddie is up 117 at 77= ... just one point behind!

RobC wrote:

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Hey, I'd expect him to beat the other robots, but still - there were a few upsets today, and it looks like the bookies predicted them!  Will we get the individual picks breakdown sheet this year?

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The individual picks breakdowns are accessible from the Competitions page.

I can probably shed some light on this because my picks turned out all to be the same as the bookies on day 1 (it's a different story on day 2, and apart from me getting Cilic right, they're getting the better of me )

The bookies (and I) got the following 4 matches wrong on day 1:

- Andy's loss (Tsonga's odds were 6.00, pick 'em entrants split 93%:7% for Andy, with most of the 7% being entrants from RichardGasquet.net, who are all French)

- Moya's loss (Koubek's odds were 3.25, pick 'em entrants split 97%:3% for Moya, even more extreme than the Andy split, but that's probably due to the French factor mentioned above, since we have next to no Spanish entrants - it is still surprising that more people didn't go for Koubek though, because although Moya beat Koubek him a week ago, Koubek beat Moya twice on hard courts last year - I was in two minds about it, but guessed more people would go for Moya so there would be more to lose if I went for Koubek and got it wrong, so unfortunately I played safe)

- Chela's loss (GGL's odds were 4.33, pick 'em entrants split 94%:6% for Chela - this was a big shock to me since Chela had won their two previous hard court matches for the loss of just 4 games each time)

- Mayer's loss to Serra (Serra's odds were 2.22, so this was always going to be a tight one, pick 'em entrants split 56%:44% for Mayer)

In all four cases, then, these were rankings upsets not foreseen by the majority of the entrants either, though only the first three were big shocks.

In fact, there were only four other matches in the bottom half of R1 where the bookies (and I) veered away from rankings and/or the consensus, so these are the ones that got us ahead of the field:

- Warburg beating Brzezicki (a rankings upset, which the bookies and I predicted, though in this case the majority, 57%, of the entrants did so too - hard courter v clay courter, after all)

- Berrer beating Young (went with rankings and Young's odds were 2.22, i.e. a bit worse than evens, but 62% of pick 'em entrants went with him)

- Levine beating Vass.-Arg. (Vass. Arg. was 2.86 with the bookies and my reasoning for agreeing with them was that Levine beat Isner & Kendrick on hard courts in Challengers in Nov 2007 and while V-A took a set off Acasuso at the USO, he lost 3, 3 & 2 to Udomchoke at the last AO and plays virtually exclusively on clay apart from slams - however, this was a rankings upset that only 35% of the entrants predicted)

- Schuettler beating Clément (another one I thought long and hard about, and the hardest R1 match to call for the bookies, who had Schuettler as 2.00, i.e. evens, and Clément at 2.02 (!) - Schuettler's 3-1 H2H did it for me, but only 29% of the entrants agreed)

So there you go, hopefully someone found that enlightening.  (the rest of you can wake up again now)


-- Edited by steven at 09:30, 2008-01-15