As I sit here about to watch the start of the Australian Open Men’s Final, it occurs to me that I have no idea what the difference is between ‘Seeding’ and ‘Ranking’.
If someone is ranked 134th in the world, I’m guessing that they are the 134th best player in the world according to all the matches and tournaments they’ve played. That seems simple enough!
But where do the ‘seed’ lists come in? One of the players in tonight’s final is Songe, a French bloke who is apparently ‘unseeded’ but who must have a ‘ranking’ on the world tennis circuit. He hasn’t just appeared out of the blue, surely?
In the majors the “best” 32 players in the draw are seeded so that they don’t meet until the later rounds. If you go here you can see how the seeds were spread out through the draw in the Australian Open.
Usually the seedings follow the rankings but not always. Wimbledon sometimes seeds clay court specialists lower than their ranking.
The worst player in the draw always plays the toughest opponents first up. I remember reading an interview with a guy years ago who drew Lendl or McEnroe in the first round of every tournament he ever played because his ranking was so low.
Thanks don’t ask. I’m not much of a tennis fan really, but there is nothing else on the telly tonight and, while I’m up with most of the jargon, the difference between the seedings and the rankings had me befuddled.
The important thing to keep in mind about seedings is that the seeded players are placed into the spots by a combination of their level of seed and luck of the draw. Thus, after the #1 and #2 are placed into the top and bottom brackets, respectively, the #3 and the #4 aren’t seeded like they are in, say, the NCAA basketball championship tournament. Instead, they are put into a hat and drawn out one at a time, so that #1 can play either #3 or #4. Then, with numbers 1 - 4 set, the #5 through #8 go into a hat, and are drawn out one at a time for their spots, so that if they win out as expected, they end up facing one of the top four seeds in the quarter-finals. Might be #1 vs. #8, but might be #1 versus #5, instead. Same for the #9 through #16, and then again for the #17 through #32.
I doubt that. When you have one of the finalists going for $10,000 for a $10 investment it is pretty easy to guarantee a profit by laying him or backing his opponent.
In a possibly uninteresting aside which I just recalled - years ago a bunch of us were talking about some tournament in which the top few seeds received a first round bye. Someone wondered how many matches would be played if there were 124 entrants and the top four seeds got byes. Everyone started to work it out, adding up the matches each round but one guy just instantly said, “One hundred and twenty three.”
I asked him how he got that so quickly and was most impressed with his answer, “Well everyone loses one match except the winner, so you need 123 matches for them each to lose one.”
This is a famous old “think outside the box” problem. In a single-elimination tournament, every match eliminates one player or team, so with N entrants the total number of matches is always N - 1.
