Tour Finals Group Hewitt - The Gory Probabilities...and I Mean Gory!
I determined there are 23 (see update) semifinal scenarios for Group Hewitt, with four different combinations of players that can make the semis. Yeah, 21. I can’t promise I didn’t miss the odd combination where a player won seven games in a set, but I think I got all or most of them.
More than half of the scenarios involve both Anderson and Thiem winning in straight sets, putting Anderson in the top spot with everyone else tied at 1-2 in matches and 2-4 in sets. In that scenario, the number of games Federer, Thiem and Nishikori win will matter. In the four posts I’ve done like this, Group Hewitt is the first where the game level probabilities matter. It essentially translates into how likely it is that a player will win a set by a certain score.
Here are the Group Hewitt probabilities of winning the match, a game and a set, and then the probabilities of 2- and 3-set wins.
The next chart shows the probability of the first 21 scenarios occurring, and if it occurs, who the #1 and #2 players are expected to be from Group Hewitt. UPDATE: There are 2 scenarios (new to me) in which Anderson does not qualify for the semifinals, unlike my original post, but they are extremely remote...basically a 0 percent chance that does not change the probabilities in a significant way, so I have not updated them below. You also will notice that all the Anderson-Thiem possibilities show as 0.0%, but they are actually slightly positive...just way to the right of the decimal. In the later charts you will see they don’t add up to much.
You can add those up to see a player’s chances of making the semis, and the chances that one of the three combinations occurs. Here they are, added for you:
There’s a little rounding error in there, which accounts for the 99.9%. It’s probably buried in one of the Anderson-Thiem probabilities, and I don’t have the stomach to dig back in there and find it.
Put the Group Hewitt info together with the info from Group Kuerten, and you get 14 possible combinations for the semifinals. The most likely semifinals are Djokovic (Kuerten #1) and Nishikori (Hewitt #2) on one side, and Anderson (Hewitt #1) and Zverev (Kuerten #2) on the other.