Federer, Nadal and Survivorship Bias

Every time, on the eve of a Federer-Nadal match, I get to hear a few comments from Federer detractors/Nadal fans about how it’s going to be yet another one-sided contest. Implicit in those comments is the assumption that they are going to irk me. But that’s hardly true, not just for me but for most TMF fans that I know. My admiration for Federer is total and unconditional but more importantly, it primarily arises out of his ability to elevate our senses through his Tennis. I worship him because watching him on a Tennis court is like listening to Raaja’s music — it transcends the mere game of Tennis, it’s a higher art.

If someone can take the contest to a person, who plays Tennis like no one has done before, it ought to be respected. If I can’t respect that, then my admiration for Federer is fake in the first place. I may not admire him, but sure as hell, I respect him. Even outside of having the better of the exchanges with Federer, Rafa is a genius in his own right and deserves that respect anyway. I didn’t feel so till that Wimbledon final, no, not that greatest match ever but the previous Wimbledon final. It was a match of equals. From then on, it has stayed that way.

Now, let’s come to the main deal. 14–7 is a clear reflection of results comfortably skewed in favor of Nadal. But here’s the thing, unlike Federer, Nadal clearly has a preference for Clay over other courts (with due respect to his all-round game), especially more so in the early part of his career. Let’s just see how the Head to Head between the two fares up on non-clay surface alone — It’s 5–4 in favor of Federer. And on clay, it is 10–2 in favor of Nadal. Of course, we should give due credit to Nadal for comfortably getting the better of Federer on clay and giving a run for his money on other courts, but that’s missing the point as well.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb keeps reiterating to death, studying the characteristics of the top 50 richest people in the world and concluding that “Having a huge risk appetite is the key to grow rich” is saying nothing at all. So many people with risk appetite have gone bankrupt as well. Technically this is called as Survivorship Bias. Potentially, Sampras could have had just as bad a HTH record against Guga for instance, but he was not good enough to make it to the far end of clay court tournaments to come up against Guga in the first place. That Federer is second only to Nadal on clay is a big compliment to him. If the downside of that is to have a heavily skewed HTH record against Nadal, it’s well worth it.

The second part of my argument is the opposite — the anti-survivorship bias, if I could call it that. If Federer paid the price for being the last survivor to turn up against Nadal consistently on clay, Nadal doesn’t seem to reciprocate that on other courts and therefore was able to maintain a better HTH record. Think of the last 6 years, how many Grand Slam finals has Nadal made it to, as compared to Federer? During this time, Federer not making the final was headline news. Alternatively, think of Nadal winning slams against an opponent, who’s not Federer. Out of his 10 Grand Slam final appearances, 7 are against Federer — out of which he won 5 (3 of them in French) & lost 2 — and only 3 against the rest. In short, he invariably took on Federer at the peak of his powers; else he lost to others in the earlier rounds. Contrast that with Federer, out of 22 Grand Slam finals, he had taken on a non-Nadal opponent 15 times and came out triumphant 14 times out of that.

We had seen an evidence of the same in Rogers Cup, in Toronto last week and now in Cincinnati.