Today marked the end of round robin play at the Bar­clays ATP World Tour Finals. The semi­fi­nal matches have been set, and I for one am quite happy not to have to work through any­more ATP logic puz­zles. Quite unusu­ally, the semi­fi­nal stage will fea­ture only one of the world’s top four play­ers. I’d imag­ine few peo­ple would’ve put money on Federer/Ferrer and Berdych/Tsonga semis at the begin­ning of the week.

While I have sus­pi­cions that the sci­en­tists at NASA devised the round robin scor­ing sys­tem in place at the World Tour Finals, when it came down to it, things were pretty sim­ple. David Fer­rer and Tomas Berdych were the only two play­ers in Group A to win two of their three round robin matches, so those are the two that move on right? Right. In the case that two play­ers are tied for num­ber of matches, the head to head of those two play­ers is the first decider. Since Berdych defeated Fer­rer in what could only be a third set melt­down from the Spaniard, Tomas emerged as the vic­tor of Group A and David comes in second.

Things were even eas­ier in Group B. Roger Fed­erer is the only player in the field to have won all three of his round robin matches, so that makes him the clear win­ner of Group B. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was the only mem­ber of Group B to win two out of three matches and so becomes the sec­ond semi­fi­nal­ist from that group. So, let’s quickly pre­view our two semi­fi­nal match ups.

Roger Fed­erer v. David Ferrer

These two vets have played each other eleven times and, unfor­tu­nately for Fer­rer, Fed­erer has won all eleven encoun­ters. That’s good news for the for­mer No. 1, who has shown out­stand­ing form in his last three tour­na­ments. Up until today, Fer­rer had also showed fine form this week, but his lack­lus­ter per­for­mance in the third set against Tomas Berdych is wor­ri­some. He can­not afford that kind of men­tal lapse against Fed­erer, who would quickly seize on the oppor­tu­nity. Regard­less of Ferrer’s level of play, it seems Fed­erer has come to Lon­don look­ing for another tro­phy and I just don’t think David has the goods to stop him this time around.

Pre­dic­tion: Fed­erer def. Fer­rer, 2 sets

Tomas Berdych v. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

Per­haps the more inter­est­ing match up of the day, these two guys have only met once on the ATP World Tour. Their first meet­ing occurred just last month in the Bei­jing semi­fi­nals. Tomas Berdych won in three sets 6–4 4–6 6–1. Both guys have had their ups and downs this week, but on the whole Tsonga has had a bet­ter sea­son and gen­er­ally looked stronger over the past few tournaments.

Pre­dic­tion: Tsonga def. Berdych, 3 sets

For those of you fol­low­ing the dou­bles, the semi­fi­nals are as follows.

Mahesh Bhupathi/Leander Paes v. Mar­iusz Fyrstenberg/Marcin Matkowski

Max Myrni/Daniel Nestor v. Bob Bryan/Mike Bryan