Estoril and Munich completed their second rounds on Thursday with only one upset. By upset I mean a result at odds with my pick. Finally, some success.

Portuguese player Frederico Gil – Estoril is in Portugal by the way – is ranked number 246 and beat Dmitri Tursunov. I suppose you could call it an upset since Tursunov is ranked number 33, but Tursunov has moved past the second round in exactly one clay court tournament in his career: Houston in 2004. As we always say here, Houston doesn’t count because the European players skip it.

Fantasy tennis is an obsession, there are probably few concrete reasons to recommend it, but I will say that you learn a lot more about every player in the draw than you ever wanted to know. Tursunov, it turns out, was born in Moscow but lives in Roseville, California. I live in California and I’ve never heard of it. Roseville is next to Citrus Heights which is next to Sacramento, the state capital. Tursunove moved to the U.S. when he was twelve years old which might explain why he has taken the tennis world by storm this week with his ATP blog. No wonder his English is so good.

Tursunov is based at the Higueras-Gorin Tennis Academy in the Sacramento area. Guillermo Coria has just started to work with Jose Higueras which might explain why Coria recently moved to Palm Springs. Living in California is a good idea but who wants to live in Sacramento?

We don’t want to forget the women altogether. The match of the week was Venus Williams vs. Martina Hingis. It was fascinating for a few reasons. This is the first time they’ve met since Hingis rejoined the tour and it’s only Venus’ second tournament of the year. Venus managed to beat Hingis in three sets. Venus’ achilles heel has always been her second serve but it’s a laser compared to Hingis’. I’d love to see Hingis’ serving statistics but the WTA is far behind the ATP when it comes to stats unless it’s a grand slam tournament or a combined tournament. Once the match is removed from the live scores window, the stats are gone.

The WTA also does not have a simple stats page nor anything like the ATP Vault, a database of past tournaments with results including challenger and future events. Memo to the WTA: If you want tennis journalists to write about your game, give them something to work with. Statistics would be a good start. Hint: look at the ATP’s site for starters.

That’s enough complaining for one day. Here are the current draws for Estoril and Munich.

(names in blue are my predictions)
ESTORIL OPEN

BMW OPEN – MUNICH