How do you serve up a successful strategy when betting on tennis?

Andy Murray’s ruthless 6-1, 6-1, 6-0 dismantling of Blaz Rola to ease into the third round of Wimbledon highlighted how one-sided the early stages of majors can be.

But with Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal not having things quite so easy in their second round matches, just what is the best way to serve up a successful strategy when betting on tennis?

Most punters tend to look towards the fixed odds when betting on tennis with match outcomes, number of sets in a match, score in sets, number of games in a set or actual set score being popular choices.

However, when you consider that Murray was as short as 1/250 to beat Rola and 2/11 to win in three sets there is often limited opportunity to try and bag betting profits unless you can successfully predict the correct set score, which again can prove tricky.

This is where playing the spreads can become an option. When spread betting on tennis you don’t need to simply back the winner to try and net profits from your punts as you can bet on the number of specified outcomes occurring in a match – for example the number of games or points to be contested or the number of aces or double faults.

So if you felt a match was going to be very one sided and therefore meaning the action could be over fairly quickly, you may opt to sell the number of games or number of points that will be contested in a match.

Another popular market for spread betting on tennis is X-Courts, which again can be utilised if you feel a match is going to be a walkover for one player. This market is based on one player’s games won in a set multiplied by their opponent’s games won in a set, aggregated for the whole match.

So in the case of Murray against Rola, X-Courts made up at just 12 ((6 x 1) + (6 x 1) + (6 x 0)) meaning spread betters who sold at 60 with Spreadex made 48 times their stake (60 – 12).

Remember though that with spread betting you can lose more than your initial stake should the market go against you, so it’s always worth bearing in mind your potential downside when placing a spread bet.

E.g. punters who sold X-Courts at 74 with Spreadex in Djokovic’s 6-4, 6-3, 6-7, 7-6 win over Stepanek would have lost 52 times their stake when the market made-up at 126 ((6 x 4) + (6 x 3) + (6 x 7) + (7 x 6)). Bear in mind also, that X-Courts is one of the more volatile markets – in the case of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s marathon 4-6, 7-6, 6-7, 6-3, 14-12 win over Sam Querrey, this market settled at 294 ((4 x 6) + (7 x 6) + (6 x 7) + (6 x 3) + (14 x 12)).

If these markets are not to your fancy, you can focus on just one player’s performance and look at the predicted spread of one player’s total games or points won and sell or buy accordingly based on your view of whether the player is going to do better or worse than the spread suggests.

Of course, if you do simply want to stick to predicting which player is going to come out on top in a match, you can play the spread betting Supremacy prices.

Supremacy markets are when spread betting firms put out spreads predicting how many games they think one player will beat another by, how many more points they think one player will win over their opponent or, in the case of a 10-3 Supremacy bet, the spread is based on the winning player being awarded 10 points plus a further three points per set won by.

So in Nadal’s 4-6, 7-6, 6-4, 6-4 win over Lukas Rosol, the 10-3 Supremacy made up at 16 in Nadal’s favour (10 + 3 + 3).

One of the big attractions with spread betting is the in-play element where prices are constantly updated during the action allowing punters to open new bets at any point or to close out during play either to take a profit or to cut a loss.

So in-play betters who took on Nadal’s 10-3 Supremacy price after he fell a set behind would have been able to buy at 10.5, meaning eventual profits of 5.5 times their stake when Spaniard came back to beat the player who had shocked him just two years earlier at the All England Club.

With Spreadex you can bet on both fixed odds and spread betting prices from one account with more than 10,000 tennis matches offered in-play per calendar year.

So next time you are looking at the fixed odds and not feeling inspired by the prices on offer, maybe take a gander at the spreads to see if they can help you net profits instead.