The source never says a match was retired. This one derives it
An unfinished match just shows a scoreline that never closes. Working out which ones those are, without being told whether a match is best-of-3 or best-of-5, across 2,364 matches.
TennisExplorer does not label retirements or walkovers anywhere: an unfinished match simply shows a scoreline that never closes, and every consumer of the data has to work out for themselves which rows those are. This Actor derives a `status` field with three values — `completed`, `retired` and `walkover` — validated against 2,364 matches across nine tournaments with mixed formats, including Davis Cup, which puts best-of-3 and best-of-5 on the same page. About 4.6% of matches are affected. `retired` means the match started and did not finish; the source does not distinguish retirement from injury, default or an abandoned rubber, so neither does the Actor.
Key points
The source publishes no status label at all — the only signal is a scoreline that does not reach a winning set count.
The derivation works without knowing the match format, which is the hard part: best-of-3 and best-of-5 have different winning counts.
Validated on 2,364 matches across nine tournaments chosen for format variety, including Davis Cup, which mixes both formats in one draw.
About 4.6% of matches are not `completed`, so a dataset that ignores this treats roughly one match in twenty as a normal result.
`retired` deliberately covers retirement, injury, default and abandonment together, because the source does not separate them.
This is the field that makes the difference between a tennis dataset you can compute on and one that quietly contains matches that never finished.
What the source does not say
TennisExplorer does not label retirements. It does not label walkovers. There is no status column, no flag, no annotation. A match that ended when somebody stopped playing looks like a match that ended normally, except that the scoreline does not reach a winning number of sets.
The only signal available
The scoreline itself. A completed best-of-3 match reaches two sets for one player; a completed best-of-5 reaches three. A match that stops short of that either did not finish, or was never really played.
status
Meaning
completed
MeaningThe scoreline reaches a winning set count for the format.
retired
MeaningThe match started and did not finish.
walkover
MeaningThe match was awarded without being played.
The format problem
“A winning set count for the format” assumes you know the format, and the results page does not say. Best-of-3 and best-of-5 need different thresholds, and guessing from the tournament name fails on exactly the events where it matters.
The derivation therefore has to work without being told which format a match is — which is what makes it a real problem rather than a comparison.
How it was validated
Against 2,364 matches across nine tournaments, chosen for format variety rather than convenience. Davis Cup is in the set on purpose: it puts best-of-3 and best-of-5 matches in the same draw, on the same page, which is the case that breaks any approach relying on a per-tournament assumption.
About 4.6% of matches in that set are not completed.
What `retired` does and does not mean
Why 4.6% matters
Roughly one match in twenty. Any statistic computed over scorelines — sets won, games won, a model's training labels — treats those matches as ordinary results unless something tells it not to. The bias is not random either: retirements cluster in long matches and late rounds.
The related trap is that the source's own result column becomes a won/lost flag on those rows, which is why set counts get recounted — the field reference explains that one.
Frequently asked questions
▸How do I know a tennis match was retired?
From the derived `status` field, which is `completed`, `retired` or `walkover`. The source itself labels none of them — an unfinished match shows a scoreline that never closes, and that is the only signal there is.
▸Does `retired` mean injury?
Not specifically. It means the match started and did not finish: retirement, injury, default, or an abandoned dead rubber. TennisExplorer does not distinguish those, so the Actor does not invent a distinction the data cannot support.
▸How reliable is the derivation?
It was validated against 2,364 matches across nine tournaments chosen for format variety, including Davis Cup, which mixes best-of-3 and best-of-5 in the same draw. It does not need to be told which format a match is.
▸How many matches are affected?
About 4.6% — roughly one in twenty. A dataset without a status field treats all of those as ordinary results, which quietly biases anything computed from scorelines.
Sources
Every URL below was requested and returned a page on the date shown.
The visible team label in doubles is cut short — `Roger-Vas` rather than the two full surnames. The complete names are in the markup, and that is 17.4% of all rows.
TennisExplorer cuts its day using a timezone cookie, so two runs of the same date can legitimately disagree. Pinning every request to UTC is what makes a dataset reproducible.
A walkthrough of extracting tennis data: one entity type per run, the day boundary that has to be pinned, and the two enrichments that cost an extra request each.
