Greenleaf wrote:

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More clay bias, by the way. The clay Masters are 64 player events but the indoor ones are 48 player ones...

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Can't remember whether this was just ATP tournaments, or included challengers as well, but it was discovered that there are actually more tournaments on hard courts than on clay, despite what it seems.

No, FD. Hard courts are normally between clay and grass/carpet in terms of speed so ideally it's fair for everyone.

no not the very upper levels, but there are defiantly players in the top 100 who basicly only play on clay all year. i doubt you'd find a top 100 player who only played grass/indoor events.

eg marcos daniel current wr78, in the past year has won only 4 matches that werent on clay, 3 of them at a hard ct challenger in his own country with the highest ranked player he bet 265. his other won was a suprising win over vilgen, 06 64 64! odd scoreline
and the last non clay (MD i didnt check qualies) match santiago venturea won was back in jul 06!

indiana wrote:

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I would suggest hard, rather than in between, is much more in line with grass and indoor.

Without researching it, I am pretty sure than one could find quite a few top 100 players with hardly a clay court win to their names.

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Looking solely at the rankings list:

Tsonga
Fish
Haas
Santoro
Johansson
Ginepri (pre-RG run of course)
Lee
Mahut
Sela
Zverev
Reynolds
Young
Guccione (although he did have a lot of points in 2006 from the South American clay challengers due to them being played at high altitude and that making his serve unreturnable)
Isner
Dancevic
Spadea

To name a few of the players who are pretty clueless on a clay court, and I'd doubt they would have many clay points to their names.

(Although there does seem to be more players in the top 100 who off a clay court wouldn't be that great)

The area of the rankings that you will usually find with more than its fair share of clay court specialists is the 70-120 range.

I think the reality is that it's much easier to get into the top 100 if you're a clay court specialist but it's then harder to do well when you get there.

The reason why it's easier to get into the top 100 as a clay court specialist is that anyone who wants to can choose to play a clay court Challenger virtually any week of the year. In fact, there are clay Challengers for 30 of the first 39 weeks of 2008 and hard Challengers of some description (H, IH or IC) for 30 of the first 39 weeks of the 2008 too (grass Challengers for just 2 weeks, and the first of those was mainly played on hard courts!), but for most of the weeks when there are both types, there seem to be more clay Challangers than hard Challengers, thus (I would imagine) making the points easier to come by on clay.

The Clay Challengers in South America in particular tend to be extremely weak because few players from outside South America (and Spain) go to them.

There is less scope to play on clay all the time once you get well into the top 100 and have to play in (and count) all the AMS events, so that's probably why quite a few clay court specialists get stuck in the 70-120 range.


-- Edited by steven at 11:27, 2008-07-08

Josh wrote:

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The entry list and the ATP site says it is a 32 draw, so no byes?

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Yes, I agree. 23 names, 2 SEs, 4 qualifiers and 3 wild cards = 32 players. BYE didn't enter this one