Australian Open: Seedings and Tournament Winners

Between 1990 and 2023, using data from Jeff Sackmann's site, the top seed has won the tournament 15 times out of 34 (44%). The second seed has won 7/34 (20.5%), so less than half the top seed winning percentage. After that, it really drops off: 2/34 for the third seed, 3/34 for the fourth seed. The highest seed to win during that period was Federer, seeded 17th, in 2017. Curiously, players seeded 5,7,9,11,12,13,14,15 have not won the tournament since 1990. Most of these are in the top half of the draw.

Tennis: how frequently do number 1 seeds win the tournament?

Back writing after many years, has it really been 10 years?

I have been reading articles about seeding in tennis and how they are meant to protect top seeds so they can meet in the later rounds, and keep tournaments interesting for fans. It made me wonder: how frequently do outcomes reflect the seeding in a tournament? A first pass at answering this is the subject of this post: how frequently do top seeds win tournaments?

We have a remarkable database available to answer such question due to Jeff Sackman. Using this data, I analyzed ATP matches between 2000 and 2023. First, the raw results.

	Tournaments	Losses of #1S	L in R128	L in R64	L in R32	L in R16	L in QF	L in SF	L in F
All Matches	1521	1106	2	17	170	269	262	219	167
A level	1218	899		0	141	232	225	182	119
Masters	208	150	0	13	26	29	26	23	33
Slams	95	57	2	4	3	8	11	14	15

The numbers are more interpretable in percentages:

	Tournaments	Losses of S1	R128	R64	R32	R16	QF	SF	F
All	1521	73%	0.18%	1.54%	15.37%	24.32%	23.69%	19.80%	15.10%
A level	1218	74%	0.00%	0.00%	15.68%	25.81%	25.03%	20.24%	13.24%
Masters	208	72%	0.00%	8.67%	17.33%	19.33%	17.33%	15.33%	22.00%
Slams	95	60%	3.51%	7.02%	5.26%	14.04%	19.30%	24.56%	26.32%