re: The Unofficial 2018 Non-GS Tennis Thread

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being seeded at wimby. Or is it too late -- as in, do they use this week's rankings?

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For some reason I thought that Wimbledon just seeded players however they wanted, and didn't necessarily follow the rankings the way the other tournaments do.

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Somehow Coric is always playing better than the previous time I watched him. He must have a good coach. The next step is turning that forehand into a bigger weapon, then he could be really dangerous on all surfaces.

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Had he progressed linearly he would already be top ten at this point. He should great promise, then slid back, but now is ramping his game back up to where a reasonable person might have expected 2-3 years ago. I really like his movement.

I'm putting him on autoplay.
Berdych is on autofade

One the one hand, Kudla is actually a pretty damn good grass court player.

On the other hand, that loss makes me pump the brakes on my bullishness on teetsy's grass court game.

Damn Benny has to be kicking himself. Couldn't make a first serve in a tight spot. I'm interested to see what BP does at Wimbledon.

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Yep, had it on his racket and couldn't get it done. Nadal was almost #1 again.

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Fed tends to be a frontrunner and close wins tend to be predictive of future losses for the man of great great smug.

Fully realizing that exactly 0% of non-MidnightVibe readers of this post will care, I am nonetheless posting about my decision to drop cuevas from my fantasy squad and add Gismo's boy Benny.

Dropping Cuevas was the easy decision -- whether to add Benny or Sugita or whoever else might have been considered was the tougher call. Neither Ben nor Sugita are going to have their rankings in seeding range for Wimby, so I just went on current form. We have 9 guys per team, and you only start 5 per tournament, so whether Benny gets a start will depend on how the draws shake out.

There are six people in our "league". My squad:
Alex
Chilly
Frownic
El Shapo
Teetsy
Tiafoe
Felpez
Daniil Medvedev
Benny P

Three of us are nearly tied for the lead and the other three have fallen back significantly. I won the past two years, and that is a source of great pride :)

Yes, I know none of you care. We've already touched on that.

Thoughts anyone?


Fri 6/22 101 Marin Cilic -240
7:00AM 102 Sam Querrey +200

Fri 6/22 127 Feliciano Lopez +160
8:00AM 128 Nick Kyrgios -185

ri 6/22 153 Jeremy Chardy -170
10:45AM 154 Frances Tiafoe +150

Fri 6/22 179 Adrian Mannarino +600
9:15AM 180 Novak Djokovic -900

Fri 6/22 1001 Roger Federer -1200
7:15AM 1002 Matthew Ebden +775

Fri 6/22 1027 Yuichi Sugita -130
6:00AM 1028 Denis Kudla +110

Fri 6/22 1053 Karen Khachanov -120
8:45AM 1054 Roberto Bautista-Agut +100

Fri 6/22 1079 Andreas Seppi +170
11:30AM 1080 Borna Coric -200

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Berdych is on autofade

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Grigor is approaching this territory too.

Without doing any research, I would take Khachanov at that price. Big edge on serve. In the past, he would find a way to lose that match, but his mental game has improved.

Chardy is way overdue for a loss, but I’m not sure if Foe is the guy to do it.

I'm a lean on both Coric and Cilic. I wasn't kidding about putting Coric on autoplay. He's on it. Let's do it, Borna!

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How did y'all do the first draw? And is anyone available to add as long as they aren't already on someone else's team? If I'm thinking of this correctly, the two people with fedal have a huge advantage, eh?

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The initial draft is a snake draft with draft order determined at random (myy niece drawing names out of a hat seems pretty random, unless my bro fixed the whole thing). We did it via a text message thread. Nothing fancy.

We're playing all majors and all masters. Masters are weighted only about half as much as majors. We have 9 players on each team. We start only 5 per tournament. Starting lineups are set via text message thread.

Scoring is straightforward. My brother (who has claimed "commish" status and taken liberties thereupon) changed up the scoring system, but the idea is still the same -- basically each level in the draw is worth a given number of points. For example, the winner of a major gets 10 points, the finalist 8, iirc. So you just want every guy on your team to advance as far as possible in every tournament.

Last year we had significant negative points for losing in the first round. I liked that twist, but my focking brother apparently thought it was too draconian and took that wrinkle out without consulting anybody. Additionally, last year we had a wrinkle where you could substitute in your highest scoring non-starter for your starter that did the worst. So if a guy you started took a first round L, but then a guy you left on the bench advanced all the way to the quarters, the latter would be deemed one of your starters and the guy who lost first round wouldn't count as a starter. This rewarded teams that were deeper, but minimized to a certain extent the importance of selecting the right starting five. I personally liked the wrinkle and didn't even know my brother had taken it out until like a month ago. fricking dick.

Our waiver rules actually need to be more clearly codified. We have rules on the books that basically set up two time periods: one where the people with higher waiver status get priority over those with lower, and then a free-for-all period. I don't exactly know what my brother was trying to get at when ye wrote those rules, but nobody has followed them. We've all just freely dropped and added from the moment a tournament ended up until the first toss of the next scored tournament. I think maybe what he was trying to do was create a system where, for some period of time, guys who were just dropped were only available to a lower waiver wire priority team if the higher priority teams hadn't selected him. But the way he wrote them doesn't do that at all.

He should have stuck with the rules as written by his more articulate younger brother. Those made more sense. Indeed, said younger brother has plans to formally address this issue at some point, but it hasn't been a priority since the way we actually have been doing it is fine...it's just not what' written in the rules. Just saying.

I try to foster a spirit of fair play by telling a particular owner when somebody they started has withdrawn from the tournament. This courtesy is not always reciprocated, but that could be because not everyone thinks to check on such things.

Last year we had 4 owners. This year we have 6. The difference is huge. Pickings are really slim on the waiver wire. now. I don't think we should expand any further. There just aren't enough players in the masters draws for it to make any sense to do that.

Regarding Fedal advantage: yes, but not so much that it's necessarily outcome determinative. I mentioned earlier that there a three team logjam at the top of the leaderboard. One of those teams is me, and I don't have Fed or Nadal. The other two teams have one and the other. So, yes, it's clearly an advantage, but not like it was with Novak two years ago and before. For the first two years we did it, the draft meant everything because whoever had Novak was gonna win. This year, I don't think the impact from a single player is quite so significant.

I think I covered most everything about our super nerdy llittle game, but if anything was less than clear, fire away.