Is Federer Stronger in a Tournament Without Nadal? An Evaluation of Odds and Seedings for Wimbledon 2009

Wimbledon is one of the most popular annual sports tournament. In the Gentlemen's Single 2009 the top seeded and defending champion Rafael Nadal withdrew from the tournament due to injury days prior to the tournament. Here, we try to analyze the effects of Nadal's withdrawal especially on the ability/strength of the main competitor Roger Federer by using bookmakers expectancies to estimate the unknown abilities of the players and compare them for two different odds sets. The comparison shows that the bookmakers did not incorporate Nadal's withdrawal adequately, assigning too high expected winning probabilities to Federer and Murray. (author´s abstact)