Daniel Weston returns to the Betting 360 podcast this week. He's a tennis betting expert who runs Tennis Ratings and produces a lot of stats and analysis that can help punters. He is also an expert contributor to the Pinnacle website.

Punting Insights:

How to approach betting on the unique grass court surface

Why big servers often under-perform in Grand Slams

Why there tends to be more upsets in the Women's game

Early value opportunities in the Men's and Women's tourneys

Some big name players that are well under the odds

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Today's Guest:

Dan Weston

Get the Transcript:

David Duffield: G’day Dan and welcome back to the show.

I just want to get your take on grass court betting and, of course, Wimbledon. Grass is a pretty unique surface, so what's your approach in looking at value bets when it comes to the grass court season?

Daniel Weston: Grass is a completely different surface to the other three surfaces in the ATP tour, which are clay, hard court, or indoor hard. Grass is probably the closest to indoor hard in terms of the court speed. Grass being the fastest surface on tour, indoor hard being the second fastest, hard being the third fastest, and clay somewhat fourth.

It kind of brings some different tools to the part of the players. What they need to be good at. With grass, serve-volley game is a predominant tool, whereas on clay it's more focused towards base-liners.

You've got a player like Nicolas Mahut who's got a serve and volley game who's very effective on grass. He'll be a dangerous player in the draw for a seeded player. Could cause an upset, for example.

The fastest surface does make for very different conditions. Obviously the big servers are rewarded, they get a lot of big points on their serves, a lot of aces, a lot of unreturnable serves.

Looking at the stats on grass on the ATP tour, 82.4% of service games were held in 2013. That's a quite a bit up from the 78.6% all surface figure. That actually drops to the 75s for clay. You can see that grass is about 7% higher service hold than clay, which obviously has a slower speed and the biggest discrepancy between the two.

Wimbledon actually, conditions have been on the fast side of average in the last couple of years. In 2013, 83.7% of surface games were held, and 83% in 2012.

Conditions looking to likely be quite fast. Weather's been good in England in the last few weeks as well. Very little rain. The courts will probably be quite dry. I don't see that changing in terms of the conditions this year.

David Duffield: In the past you've mentioned that at Grand Slam events, the big servers can under perform? How do you marry that up against the fact that having a decent serve on grass can be such a bonus?

Daniel Weston: Well, it's a tough one. I think I still stand correct that a big server hasn't made past their quarterfinals, or... maybe it's one if you count Janowicz at Wimbledon last year, in recent memory.

I don't see that changing. The fact that it's a very fast surface with very few service breaks means that the big servers will actually have more variance in their matches, because they're going to be playing a lot of tie breaks. They're going to be playing a lot of one break sets.

Those kind of sets are determined on one or two key points a lot of the time. The variance for those guys is really high. You can see someone like John Isner losing like a 6-4, 6-7, 7-6, 7-6 kind of match, where there's really few breaks but he's just on the wrong end of a couple of key points.

Actually, he does play the key points quite well, but that was just an example that I was using. But then by the same token, you've got Ivo Karlovic, who could cause an upset,