steven wrote:

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Someone's been tweeting me that there were very irregular betting patterns on that match - says Anna's odds were 1.06 when she was a break up in the 3rd and then money piled in for the 8th seed, so it was a 'clear fix'.

The thing that strikes me most about that though is not that money piled in on the higher-ranked player when the match started to turn but that the lower-ranked player (i.e. Anna) was as hot a favourite as 1.06 implies (i.e. about 94% chance of winning) when the higher-ranked player was only a single break down and it was a women's match, so you would expect more breaks. Sounds to me like an odds-setting screw-up rather than a 'clear fix'.

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 The probabilities can fluctuate wildly from point to point. If it's deuce, the two players are at evens for the game. The player with an ad is a 3/1 on favourite to win that game, based on heads or tails. So the algorithms change enormously.

The computer will also be running through 100,000 or so previous matches. If a player hasn't won one of the last 3 games, in the third set, it will know to 1,000th of a decimal percentage whether or not she is likely to retire. So if Anna's opponent holds serve from 0-3, 40-40, both her mathematical odds have shifted enormously, and the odds that she's injured are vastly reduced.

Nothing to do with "money piling on". Anybody with any knowledge of that certainly wouldn't be tweeting about it. The odds can change enormously, due to computer algorithms, the tennis scoring system, and the computer's analysis of past match history, without a cent being laid on either side.