Re: Suicide Tennis | WTF London - Post your Day 5 Picks! Hidalgo vs Mark Lenders!
PLAYER INTERVIEW - MARK LENDERS
1. First of all, congrats on qualifying for the WTF! Was that your main goal at the beginning of the season?
Thanks. No, qualifying to the WTF was sort of my minimum goal. My main goal was to win as many tournaments as possible and be ranked #1 - in the end, I won 2 tournaments (Madrid and Nice) and I'm currently #10 in the race, so I fell a big short of my main goal.
But all things considered 2015 has been a good year for me and I'm happy to have qualified for the World Tour Finals, it's been a year where many players had very consistent seasons and the point cutoff for WTF qualification was much higher than ever before. Even being #10, I'm just 820p off #1 so I believe I'm still very much in the mix.
2. What has been your proudest suicide moment of the season?
The titles I won of course, in Madrid and Nice; it's always a nice feeling to go all the way in a tournament. Also the 14 weeks I spent ranked #1 during the year. My proudest achievement in this game ever though is being the quickest player to reach #1 after starting to play the game (excluding the first year of the game of course); started in Indian Wells 2014, became #1 after Kuala Lumpur 2014 (roughly 7 months).
3. What has been your most disappointing perfomance of the season?
This is a tough question since I believe there were quite a few tournaments where I could have done better this year. One that comes to mind is the Canada Masters, where I picked Isner on QF day and was planning to go with Djokovic in the SF and Murray in the F. Isner then wasted a lot of match points and lost to Chardy in a 3-tiebreak match. There's no guarantee the rest of the tournament would have panned out the same way had Isner won, but still I feel like I missed a big chance to win the title there and a lot of extra points by the narrowest of margins. More recently in Bercy, on day 2 I was hesitant between picking Sock and RBA, ended up going with Sock, wrong decision and my tournament was over... looking at how the rest of the tournament panned out, I think I could have gone far.
Also, I got to SF day of both Dubai and Wimbledon with Federer and Djokovic available. In Dubai I went with Djokovic winning the final, at Wimbledon I went with Federer, can't help but wish I had gone the other way round in both cases. It was especially disappointing at Wimbledon because I had won the tournament in 2014 and winning a Slam tournament in 2 consecutive years would have been really cool.
But ultimately, this is why playing Suicide Tennis is so fun: there's a chance of losing in every single day, there's always risk involved and even the best-laid plans can be derailed. If it was easy, it'd not be half as fun.
4. Who would you like to see win the title, if not yourself?
Well, Droog and The Fogmeister are the only two other participants that I know on a personal level/have chatted with outside of MTF, so I guess them - even through Droog only qualified by vulturing back-to-back ATP 500 events
But being a top player myself for over a year, I know how hard it is to be a top player in this game and get the amount of points required to play this tournament - it's not the kind of game where you can do well by just looking at odds and picking the favorites every time and while luck plays a role sometimes you can't get 6k+ points out of sheer luck, it takes great tennis knowledge and a certain amount of dedication, even just to never forget to submit picks -, so I have great respect for everyone who managed to qualify and wish everyone the best of luck. Hopefully we have many winners, with me being one of them of course.
5. Who do you think will win the actual tournament, and who do you think is the darkhorse?
I think Ferrer is going to win the tournament and I also think everyone should pick him when he plays Djokovic or Murray on matchday 1, especially the 9 players ahead of me in the race
Failing that, obviously Djokovic is the prohibitive favorite to win this tournament but below that it's hard to predict, especially before seeing the groups. I could see any of the other players aside from Ferrer reach the SFs if things go right for them, especially considering that there are some questions marks regarding Murray's focus with the DC final approaching and Federer's form. I don't think this will be an easy tournament from a Suicide Tennis point of view
6. Do you like the idea of 16 players qualifying for the WTF, or would you prefer only 8 like in the actual tournament?
Well, I wouldn't have qualified this year if it was just an 8 player field so I guess I'm not the best person to answer this
But looking at it from an unbiased point of view, I think it makes sense to have 16 players qualify. In the ATP, there's quite a gap in quality between the top few and the rest, if the #1 loses to the #16 it's quite a considerable upset; in ST, this is really not the case, the gap between the #1 and #16 isn't that big at all in terms of how good they are as ST players (and even in the rankings, only 1300 points separate #1 from #16 right now), not to mention the rankings are far more dynamic on a week-to-week basis. I think a 16-man field achieves the right balance between it still being very challenging to qualify for the tournament and allowing a lot of great players who are close to each other in 'skill' to take part.
7. What is your main goal for the next season? Any particular tournaments you would like to do well in?
My main goal is to win as many tournaments as possible and to return to #1 in the rankings and the tournaments I most want to do well in are of course the Slams, it'd be great to win at least one of the four Slams. Winning an ATP 500 would be cool too since I haven't won one yet: my 4 titles to date have been a Slam, a Masters 1000 and 2 ATP 250s. Of course winning the Olympics would also be great, especially considering the next chance to achieve that will only come in 2020 and who knows if I'll even be playing this game or posting on MTF at all at the time
Also, assuming I can stay in the top 10 after the WTF (it certainly won't be easy), I'll have been ranked inside the top 10 for 78 consecutive weeks and I'd definitely like to extend that streak as far as possible next year.
I'm aware that these are very difficult goals though; there are so many great players doing consistently well in this game right now that it will be a huge challenge to stay close to the top of the rankings. That's without even mentioning some legends of this game like Litotes or RoddickFan. (both former #1s with incredibly long stays in the top 10/5), who had a relatively poor 2015 by their standards but will surely be back to fight for the top ranking spots in 2016, and the possibility of new great players joining the game and hopefully my good friend and also a former #1 VamosRafaNadal making a return. I'm sure 2016 will be another fun Suicide Tennis year and I'm looking forward to it.
8. Which Grand Slam would you like to win the most?
Well, I've already won Wimbledon in 2014 and was very close to doing it again in 2015, so one of the other 3 would be nice. The way I approach this game is to always focus on trying to win the next tournament, so I'm going to say the Australian Open since it's the next Slam. It'd be a great way to start 2016.