Highlights

• • Crawford's career record is substantially stronger than Xiao's
• • Current market prices imply a higher win probability than our estimate, producing negative EV

Pros

• + Crawford has a markedly better overall win rate and more match experience
• + Both players' recent activity on hard courts reduces unknown surface risk

Cons

• - Market already heavily favors Crawford, leaving no positive expected value
• - Recent match-level noise and limited head-to-head information create outcome uncertainty

Details

We compared the market-implied probability (home 1.20 -> ~83.3%) to our estimated true probability for Oliver Crawford. Crawford's career win rate (62-22, ~73.8%) is substantially stronger than Linang Xiao's (19-23, ~45.2%), and both have Challenger-level activity on hard courts recently. We assign Crawford a realistic match win probability of 80.0% — acknowledging his superiority but also accounting for variance, opponent ability, and small-sample noise in recent results. At the current decimal price of 1.20 the expected value is negative (EV = 0.80*1.20 - 1 = -0.04), so there is no value to back Crawford at the available market price. To be profitable we would need at least 1.25 decimal on Crawford.

Key factors

• • Clear disparity in career win rates (Crawford ~73.8% vs Xiao ~45.2%)
• • Both players have recent Challenger-level hard-court activity, limiting a surface edge
• • Market-implied probability (83.3%) slightly exceeds our realistic estimate (80%), removing value