How Many Matches Do Pro Tennis Traders Actually Trade?

If you are interested in learning how to trade tennis on Betfair then you are probably wondering just how many tennis matches you would be expected to trade every week if you went professional. This is certainly a question I get asked often and the short answer is that it “depends” while the long answer is below.

Trading Only Live TV Matches

If you read the football version of this article then you will know that the main moral is to trade quality over quantity. In Tennis Trading it is hard to spot in advance just which matches will throw up the best opportunities since it really is all about the in-play action. So while you should be looking to only trade matches that you can watch live you might also need to keep a website like Flashscores open in order to find the match you want to trade.

During a Grand Slam tournament there will be multiple matches all being played at once and sometimes the match that is live on TV is actually the worst one to be trading. For example, when Wimbledon is being shown on the BBC they have a habit of showing the big names such as Murray (of course), Nadal, Djokovic and Federer in the early rounds when you can be pretty sure they are going to win the match 3-0 without breaking sweat. Obviously the TV channels are not interested in helping tennis traders as they know these names will bring in more viewers but the more competitive matches are usually found behind the red button. Personally, if I saw any match had a favourite priced sub 1.10 at the start I would not bother trading it unless I found out, via Flashscores or even Twitter, that the favourite was in trouble. Then it might be worth heading over.

So while you want to trade only live matches you can watch, you want to make sure these are competitive matches too.

So how many matches per week?

A full time tennis trader recently showed me his p&l for the final months of the year and I could see straight away he was actually only trading 2-3 matches per day. This might be surprising to hear considering there are sometimes 10-20 matches on per day which could mean he is missing out on other opportunities but he said that he knew he could not possibly focus fully on more matches in a single day, let alone try and trade 2 or more at the same time.

What is interesting about the way tennis tournaments shape up is that, for a tennis trader, the workload actually becomes less as the week progresses. As the tournament approaches the business end there are less matches and by the weekend the full time trader is usually only trading 1 match per day.

So when I looked over the p&l I found he was actually only trading 10 matches on average per week. Granted, some of these matches can go on for many hours but when you look at it that way it makes the workload appear much easier then many novices would first think.

On the flip side…

I am aware of a professional tennis trader who makes a point of trading EVERY single match. He is probably one of the rare few that do this approach and if it works then fair play.

He has his strategy set out, keeps a website like Flashscores open looking for a particular opporunity to crop up. When it does he heads over and places the particular trade and then greens up (or reds up) when the time is right.

Apparently this approach has done very well for him but it is not something I would suggest a novice try in the beginning. If you know you have a strategy that can work blindly then go for it but in most cases you need to watch the action to make your decisions.