I was clicking through the UK Open results, looking for a specific player, and thought, "Wow, a lot of these matches are blowouts."
That got me to wondering, "How many games does the loser win, on average, in a race to 10?"


So, before you read on, guess how many games you think the average loser won in the UK Open, Races to 10...




Across the 124 matches played in the second round, all races to 10 and going from 128 players down to 4 (then they extended the races), the average loser won almost exactly 5 games (5.008)*.

In the round of 128, the loser won 4.84 games.
In the round of 64, the loser won 4.72
In the round of 32, the loser won 5.81
In the round of 16, the loser won 4.63
In the round of 8, the loser won 7.5

Total wins for the losing player, for all 124 games (race to 10):

Won ZERO games: 4 times
1 game: 8 times
2 games: 8 times
3 games: 17 times

(Maybe we would say the loser got blown out in 29.8% of the matches)

4 games: 21 times
5 games: 10 times
6 games: 15 times
7 games: 17 times

(Maybe we would say the loser was competitive in 50.8% of the matches)

8 games: 13 times
9 games: 11 times

(Maybe we would say the loser suffered a narrow defeat in 19.6% of the matches)

So, any surprises there, or is this what you would have expected? I thought the average losing score would be closer to 6 games, and there were more blowouts than I would have anticipated.

*If scores randomly distributed we could expect an average losing score around 4.5 games, but losing scores could skew higher, given that the players reaching round two could be fairly heterogeneous in ability.