Round 1 for the Men’s Singles tournament was played out over Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 January 2017. This article provides a quick update to my initial predictions.

Tuesday 17/01

After a review of the day 1 matches, for the first half of the Men’s Single’s draw, out of the 32 matches, my track record and accuracy in terms of predictions is 21 correct and 11 inaccurate predictions. With the 66% success rate, it will be interesting to see how Day #2 plays out since the other second half of the draw kicks off on Day #2. All the top seeded players have successfully moved on to Round 2 matches, which is partly where my predictions have great accuracy – my strategy was largely to go with the higher seeded player.

Wednesday 18/01

After factoring in the second half of the draw for Round 1 results that were recorded for day 2, 7 match predictions were called incorrectly, meaning that I had a higher success rate/accuracy of 78%. In total, my prediction for Round 1 as a whole, has an accuracy of 72% (46 out of 64 matches). There was one main upset to the draw and results in the injury-induced retirement of Tommy Haas after a short play of less than 2 sets. The stand-out match for Round 1 is the five-set epic match between Ivo Karlovic and Horacio Zeballos, where the five hour+ match saw the two men fight it out to the last 156-minute fifth set where Ivo finally broke through to establish the winning 22-20 result. A total of five matches ended with player retirements, with most transpiring early in the match except for the fifth-set retirement of Peter Polansky against Pablo Busta. The media have already noted the Round 1 jitters that top seeded players have all experienced, where even the best players have been tested in five-set matches so quickly.

Round 2 and beyond

It will be interesting to follow through with this approach to comparing actual results against my baseline predictions. So far, no upsets have transpired which change the fundamentals of my Finals prediction, which remains unchanged. In fact, I do not intend to revise my predictions from the original baseline. The inclusion and update to the core data to name all qualifiers has not materially changed my overall predictions, although it did affect 5 out of my 11 matches where qualifiers were present. In those five instances, I had simply used the rule that the then un-named qualifier was unlikely to win their first round match up against the higher-ranked seeded player – and this has been proven wrong in five instances. However, given I was correct in predicting six other matches, it is inconclusive as to whether the principle holds true.

I suspect my accuracy will improve with subsequent rounds given I expect the top-seeded players to progress and knock out players who have succeeded when I did not predict their win.