New in the knowledge bank: Article on curious draws at Grand Slam tournaments

The summary

Facts and statistics strongly indicate that draws at the Grand Slam tournaments 2008-2011 might have been fixed at the very top of men's tennis. Namely, in 12 out of 12 Grand Slam tournaments played on hard and grass courts between 2008 and 2011, Federer and Djokovic were always drawn to the same half of the draw, while Nadal and Murray were drawn to the other half.

In addition, in five of those 12 tournaments Murray was not among the first four seeded players, so his draw was conducted separately five times. Thus, the statistics are as follows: to get the same result 12 out of 12 times, probability is 1 in 4096. For the case of Murray's separate draws which produced the same result 5 out of 5 times, it is 1 in 32.

Therefore, the probability to obtain draw results as obtained at the 12 grand slam tournaments is 131072 to 1 (4096 x 32 = 131072). Combined with a study conducted by ESPN on the draws of unseeded players at US Open it reaches 1 in many billions.

Read the full article here.

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Katarina Pijetlovic is a lecturer in EU law at Law School of Tallinn University of Technology and a researcher at the University of Helsinki.