Simulate a match

ATP men's tour WTA women's tour

Pick any two players and play the match out on court, set by set, on hard, clay or grass. Their head to head and surface Elo ratings sit beside it.

How the simulator works

What it does

It plays the match on a computer, point by point, 2,000 times. Every point is like a weighted coin flip: the player who is better on that court wins a few more of them. Games, sets and tiebreaks follow the real rules.

The match you watch on the court is one of those 2,000, played out so you can see how it went.

Where the numbers come from

Surface Elo: A rating for each player on hard, clay and grass. Beat a strong player and it goes up a lot; lose to a weaker one and it drops. It moves after every match, so a player on a good run climbs and one in a slump falls. That is how recent form gets in.
Serve and return: How often each player held serve over the last 52 weeks, and how often they hit aces and double faults. Big servers win more quick points and play more tiebreaks.
Putting it together: The point odds are tuned so that, across all 2,000 matches, each player wins about as often as their surface Elo says they should.

What the percentages mean

If a player shows 64%, they won about 1,280 of the 2,000 matches. It does not mean they win for sure: the other player still won about 720. “Most likely scores” are the scorelines that came up most often.

Best practice

Run it 3 to 5 times and go with the majority. Each run is a fresh set of 2,000 matches, so the numbers move a little each time. The player who comes out ahead in most of your runs is the stronger read.

At the end of the day it is a simulation, not a guaranteed result. Injuries, weather, nerves and plain bad days are not in it.

Player 1