Taiwan’s Chan Chin-wei advanced to the quarter-finals of the doubles at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart, Germany, on Monday after beating a high-profile pairing in the first round.
Chan and Liang Chen of China, playing their third tournament as a pairing, defeated wild-cards Belinda Bencic of Switzerland, ranked the world No. 34 in singles, and Simona Halep of Romania, the singles world No. 3, who were playing as a partnership for the first time.
Chan and Liang looked far stronger for the first half of the match as they stormed out to a 6-1, 5-1 lead.
After Halep held her serve in the next game, Chan and Liang had four match points on Liang’s serve at 6-1, 5-2, but Bencic and Halep kept bouncing back and they went on to win six games in a row to take the second set 7-5.
The Swiss-Romanian duo then cruised to a 5-1 lead in the super tiebreak and were two points from victory at 8-5, before the cross-strait pairing rallied to win the final five points to complete a 6-1, 5-7, 10-8 victory in 1 hour, 32 minutes.
Chan and Liang saved five of eight break-point chances and converted four of nine to set up a quarter-final against either second seeds Caroline Garcia of France and Katarina Srebotnik of Slovenia or German wild-cards Antonia Lottner and Carina Witthoeft.
Monday’s only main draw singles match saw Witthoeft oust fellow German Mona Barthel 7-5, 6-3 in 1 hour, 21 minutes to set up a second-round match against either fifth seed Ana Ivanovic of Serbia or France’s Garcia, who were due to play yesterday.
Evgeniya Rodina of Russia, Bethanie Mattek-Sands of the US, Kateryna Bondarenko of Ukraine and Petra Martic of Croatia won their final qualifying matches on Monday to secure spots in the singles main draw.
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