Much has been made of the fact that David Nalbandian has a career winning record against Roger Federer but it’s rather misleading. Federer came within two points of beating Nalbandian in the title match of last year’s championship in Shanghai despite the fact that he had missed seven weeks with an injured ankle. Previous to that match, Nalbandian had not beaten Federer since 2003.

It’s curious to note that nine of the ten matches between these two took place at a Masters Series or slam event. In the only smaller event, Nalbandian beat Federer in his home town of Basel in 2002. That wasn’t very nice.

Tomorrow they meet again in the semifinals of the Tennis Masters Series Rome. I’m less concerned about Nalbandian’s career record against Federer than Federer’s difficulties with Nicolas Almagro today. After Federer won the first set 6-3, Almagro took the second set tiebreaker 7-2. Almagro had trouble serving at 5-6 in the third set to lose it 5-7 else they were heading for another tiebreak.

Almagro has played exactly one match on hard court this year, a first round loss to Igor Andreev in the Australian Open, otherwise he’s a monster on clay where he’s 22-5. It might have been the perfect preparation for Federer. While everyone else in the round had a romp, Federer fought past a tough opponent and is more than ready for Nalbandian and, hopefully, Nadal.

Federer vs. Nadal is not a rivalry unless Federer can beat Nadal now and then. A victory on clay would be a good start.

I was 4 for 4 in picking quarterfinal matches and I’m 30 for 52 overall in this tournament. That means that I’ve been correct 57% of the time. Books on gambling tell you that you are doing o.k. if you make 53% or more of your bets. If you’re winning more than 57 or 58% of your bets, then you’re not taking enough chances, you’re choosing easy bets and are probably not making as much money as you could.

The purpose here is to play fantasy tennis, not gamble, but I wonder if playing fantasy tennis has a similar effect as gambling. When you gamble, what happens durin the game is not as important as the final score and whether you won the bet. I wonder if fantasy game players find themselves paying more attention to the outcome of a match and less to the tennis itself.

How about you?

One upset today in the quarterfinals at Rome. Sort of. Even though Ramirez-Hidalgo (that must be the longest name in the ATP, longer than Srichaphan) is a qualifier, it was surprising to see Ancic beat him. It’s not like Ancic can go on and beat Nalbandian but a quarterfinal appearance on clay at a Masters Series event is a good result.

The same goes for Roddick. How many of you had him in the quarterfinals? His match with Monfils is the only one that’s hard to pick. Monfils is a better clay player by far than Roddick but he’s had a very rough start to his year. Monfils is developing good patience but sometimes he just whacks the ball and sends it flying out of the court. You really appreciate Nalbandian if you watch him long enough because he can hit his share of winners but you never see him overhit. Sometimes I just want to get in the face of some of the younger players and yell and them, “Look at Nalbandian! Do you see him trying to hit the ball a million miles an hour? No. You don’t. And where is Nalbandian ranked? Let’s see, how does number three in the world sound to you? Stop hitting the ball so damn hard you dummy.”

It’s a tossup but I’m going with Monfils. While Monfils has been ineffective, Roddick has been downright self-destructive at times. He might as well have planted a tiny biological bomb in his body before his loss to Andreev at Indian Wells, his frustration was that strong.

It’s mean of me to say it but I’d enjoy Gonzales beating Nadal so I could gain some ground on everyone, and it probably is everyone, who has Nadal on their team for this tournament. It would help cover the damage of forgetting, yes, totally forgetting to pick Nadal as I was falling asleep in front of my computer Sunday night.

Enough about the men. I wish I could find a broadcast of the Mauresmo vs. Hingis quarterfinal match at Berlin. That’s gonna be fascinating. The wily tortoise and the flighty hare. I’m not referring solely to court movement, Hingis is not slow, but her second serve certainly is and Mauresmo can fly around the court. I think that Hingis can get to the top ten but not the top five and I would be very, very surprised if she won another slam.

Here’s the scene from Rome:

I was 10 for 16 picking winners for the second round of the Rome Masters Series. Not bad. Of course, it’s much easier to pick winners in the second round because there are so many more unknowns in the first round.

Just out of curiosity, I did a few probability calculations today. There are four possible outcomes of the semifinal round of a tournament. Think of it this way: if Nadal and – I can’t believe I’m suggesting this – Andy Roddick played in one semifinal and Federer and Nalbandian – more likely – played in the other, there are four possible final pairings: Roddick vs. Federer, Roddick vs. Nalbandian – nah to either of those, Nadal vs. Nalbandian and Nadal vs. Federer.

So, in the semifinal, there are two matches and each match will have one of two winners. That means that there are 2 to the power of 2 possible outcomes which equals 4. In the second round today, there were 16 matches. That means that there were 2 to the power of 16 = 65, 536 possible outcomes. The draw could have had 65,536 different configurations after today.

In the first round there were 32 matches and that gave you a total of 4,294,967,296 (that is over 4 billion) possible configurations. All by way of saying that filling out brackets for a tennis tournament is not so very easy. Remember the craziness of March Madness? I assume it’s the same this with World Cup. Everyone and their second cousin once removed is jabbering away about which team unexpectedly lost and completely messed up their bracket.

In fantasy tennis, fanatical team owners fill out a bracket every week. Fantasy football players only have to pick which players to activate for their team on Sundays and baseball team owners make trades now and then, but we have to fill out a 32 player, 64 player, or, on a slam week, a 128 player drawer and fill it in 44 weeks a year. Fantasy tennis addiction groups are forming now.

One of the picks I missed today was Roddick vs. Baghdatis. Baghdatis should have won the match, he had the correct strategy. He hit drop shots to Roddick to get him to the net. Roddick got there as quickly as he could but he kept putting the ball down the line whereupon Baghdatis passed him. Easy as pie. Except that Baghdatis couldn’t keep the ball in the court. It was a golden opportunity for Baghdatis because Monfils, Santoro, and a qualfier are the only remaining players in his quarter.

Federer rolled over Potito Starace but that wasn’t the news of the day for him. He met Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s square earlier in the day – what, the Pope didn’t invite him inside? – and spoke a few word in German to the former Cardinal Ratzinger. I would consider that just as important as playing a match against Potito Starace except that I don’t believe in God and whenever I think of the current Pope I remember a cartoon that came out when he was elected to his current position that shows him partying with a large crowd and yelling out, “Let’s party like it’s 1299!” That is a hilarious and astute comment about Benedict’s views on women and gays and lesbians.

Anyway, back to tennis. Almagro vs. Davydenko is an interesting matchup. Davydenko is the higher ranked veteran but Almagro has made it to the quarterfinals and further in his last four clay ATP events so I’m switching to Almagro. I wanted to put him in to the quarters as soon as I saw that he had qualified into the tournament but I forgot.

Monfils has beaten Santoro on clay, Gonzalez is the clay court player not Berdych, both of the Brits – Heman and Rusedski – go down, and Ancic has never done much on clay.

Closer and closer to another Federer-Nadal dustup.

It’s very hard to pick winners in the first round of a tennis tournament. Look at the Rome Masters Series for instance. Nicolas Almagro got in as a qualifier and changed the top quarter of the draw drastically. Nikolay Davydenko doesn’t look so good all of a sudden though I’m holding him in the quarters for the time being. And who expected Ginepri to win a match or Malisse to show up let alone beat Gaudio? Roddick’s quarter of the draw opened up for Baghdatis with Robredo and Haas gone. I’ll bet there are a lot of team owners who didn’t even notice Rusedski’s name in the draw till he knocked Robredo out. On the other hand, we’re getting used to Coria losing to a qualifier and we expected Moya to lose to Nadal.

The only semi places that look solid are Federer, Nadal and Nalbandian. Nalbandian is the kind of guy you want to save for hard court slams and Masters Series events because he is a regular semifinal guy. Not so great for his career but a good thing for fantasy tennis because you can pick Federer and Nadal for the final and pencil Nalbandian into the semis. I think this is what they mean when they say that fantasy games skew the sport. How can something be good for the your fantasy team but not the player’s career?

You can never count out home court advantage. Filippo Volandri and Andy Murray had almost identical statistics in their first round match, they both had an abysmal number of unforced errors, but Volandri had the crowd behind him. As he was serving for the match, he hit a drop shot that sat on the net for a second before rolling towards the sideline and landing on Murray’s side of the net. Home court adantage indeed.

I was 16/32 in the first round. That’s exactly 50% which means that I was about as effective as someone picking petals to determine if she loves me, she loves me not. Complain if you like but don’t tell me you had Rusedski and Malisse winning. Did you?