Is Federer Stronger in a TournamentWithout Nadal? An Evaluation of Odds and Seedings for Wimbledon 2009

Abstract

Wimbledon is one of the most popular annual sports tournament. In the Men’s Single 2009 the top seeded and defending champion Rafael Nadal withdrew from the tournament due to injury days prior to the tournament. Here, we try to analyze the effects of Nadal’s withdrawal especially on the ability/strength of the main competitor Roger Federer by using bookmakers expectancies to estimate the unknown abilities of the players and comparethem for two different odds sets. The comparison shows that the bookmakersdid not incorporate Nadal’s withdrawal adequately, assigning too high expected winning probabilities to Federer and Murray.