Tennis Betting Strategy: Accumulators and Over/Under Total Number of Games

Rory Jiwani

April 30th, 2021

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In the early rounds of tennis tournaments, there are often encounters which appear – on paper, at least – to be somewhat one-sided. Instead of taking prohibitive odds on a fancied player to win a match, plenty of tennis betting aficionados combine several favourites in an accumulator to increase their returns. Another tennis betting strategy is to target the under/over game market, where you can bet on the total number of games in a tennis match.

Accas, as they are often called, are a staple of football betting and are also among the most popular bets in tennis. The over/under market - which is usually entitled 'Over/Under Total Number of Games' - is definitely one to consider. Here, we dive into tennis betting strategy and take a look at both in detail.

Accumulator Betting

Tennis accumulator betting does exactly what it says on the tin. You pick a number of players to win their respective matches and they all have to win for you to land the accumulator bet.

As an example, there were five matches completed on the first day of the main draw at the ATP 500 at Eastbourne in 2019. The favourites were priced up as follows: 2/5, 4/5, 33/50, 6/10, 3/10, with the accumulator bet on all five favourites coming to 15/2.

But the player priced at 4/5 was James Millman who went down in three sets to Fernando Verdasco, so the bet lost. There was little to choose in that match but if you employed a safer strategy, eg. only backing players priced 3/5 or shorter, you were left with a treble paying out at accumulator odds of 19/10 (which did win).

Of course, you can tailor your tennis accumulator to include players you think are overpriced and exclude those you deem suspect on the surface or out of form. But the risk, as with all accas, is that one player lets you down. Ladbrokes is among the small number of bookmakers who offer 'acca insurance' on tennis accumulator betting. They will return the value of your stake as a free bet if one leg lets you down, although your acca must have a minimum of five legs and combined odds of at least 3/1.

Some online bookmakers also offer lucrative bonuses on winning accumulators. Bet365 will pay a bonus ranging from 5% for a winning double or treble through to 20% for a six-fold all the way to 50% for a 12-fold or greater.

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Tennis Betting Over/Under Market

Here’s another popular betting market where the clue is in the name. Tennis betting over/under is also labelled simply as 'Total Games'. You simply bet on whether a match will last over or under a specified number of games. Each set can have a maximum of 13 games (the tiebreak being the 13th game) unless it is a decider in certain Grand Slam events when a margin of two clear games is required to secure victory.

With service holds easier and more common in the men’s game, a match between two fairly evenly matched players will result in a threshold figure of either 23.5 or 24.5 for a best-of-three encounter. In the women’s game, where breaks are more common, this number drops to 20.5 or 21.5. The odds for overs and unders are usually initially priced up as 17/20 for each side and these will change according to bet volumes.

Related: For bonuses and offers check out New betting sites.

Some of the best tennis bookies will offer alternative under/over game tennis thresholds with bigger price differentials. So a match with 17/20 either side for 23.5 games may be priced up as 33/100 for over 20.5 games and 2/1 for under 20.5 games.

In-play kicks off at the start of the match with more threshold options usually becoming available. As the match progresses, these odds change and it is simple to adjust your staking plan based on how you see the match going. If a player is getting on top and looks to be on the way to a quick win, it might be profitable to bet ‘Unders’. Similarly, if it looks like a tight encounter, ‘Overs’ will be the way forward.

Matches going to three sets are usually fatal to ‘Unders’ bets. And the more one-sided the match is on paper, the fewer games should - theoretically - be required to decide the outcome.