Our Picks For This Week's Tennis

Whilst definitely the poor relation of the two WTA tournaments this week, WTA Merida still boasts a field including Grand Slam winners, recent Grand Slam semifinalists and one of the most exciting talents on the tour.

The tournament is to be played outdoors on a Solflex hard court, which is a surface rarely used in hard court tournaments around the world so it will be interesting to see how the courts play in Mexico this week.

This tournament is new to the WTA Tour, replacing Abierto Zapopan.

WTA Dubai is given the full famous grid analysis treatment on site and the ATP Tour has tips for all three events too.  You can read our tips for ATP DohaATP Marseille and ATP Rio on site.

WTA Merida Betting Tips

The Chinese is in the form of her life, now up to #41 in the rankings and coming off the back of a title in Hua Hin. The section that she is in is fairly stacked but her price is fair for the form that she brings to the table.

The American young hot-shot has a draw which suggests she should be able to ease into the tournament somewhat, with the aim of being flying with confidence when hitting more difficult obstacles from the quarter-final stage onwards.

From what I have seen in qualifiers, Parks’ big serve and big groundstrokes should be effective here on this surface and so she could be hard to stop for anyone in the draw.

The bottom half of the draw is very open, which could leave the way open for a good seeded player to come through the draw. We must be wary of Sloane Stephens, who can sometimes put a run together in this type of rvent frimt little preparation, but Cocciaretto has a lot of decent recent results.

These results include a run of 8 wins in 9 matches in Mexico in October last year. In her run to the Tampico title she defeated Magda Linette (#1 seed here), Lin Zhu, and Camila Osorio, all in the draw here.

WTA Merida Draw

The draw in Merida is a 32-player draw, with eight seeds. The final qualifiers will be decided in Monday’s play.