Flavia Pennetta of Italy beat Klara Koukalova of the Czech Republic 6-1, 6-3 on Sunday in the first round of the singles at the Connecticut Open.
Sixth seed Pennetta used two straight aces to clinch the win.
“She fights until the last point,” Pennetta said. “I went for the last points on my serve. I did not want to get into a rally.”
Pennetta, who had to go through qualifying for the tournament last year, won the first four games against Koukalova.
“I tried to be aggressive and stay close to the baseline,” Pennetta said. “She’s a really good player. Sometimes it looks as though she’s not trying, but that’s the way she plays. You never know what she’s going to do.”
Pennetta is next to face Alison Riske of the US in the second round. The two have not played each other before.
Riske beat Casey Dellacqua of Australia 6-1, 6-4 in her first-round match.
Dellacqua broke Riske’s serve in the first game, but world No. 43 Riske won the next six games to clinch the first set.
At 4-4 in the second set, Riske broke world No. 30 Dellacqua’s serve, then closed out the match.
Camila Giorgi of Italy won 6-3, 6-1 over Coco Vandeweghe of the US.
Giorgi fell behind 3-1 in the first set, but rallied to win the next five games. She had four aces and only one double fault, needing just 24 minutes to win the second set.
Ekaterina Makarova of Russia beat Roberta Vinci of Italy 6-3, 6-3.
World No. 18 Makarova has reached the semi-finals of her past two tournaments, in Washington and Montreal.
In the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching crashed out in the first round on Sunday.
Chan and her partner, Zheng Jie of China, seeded fourth, saved only one of six break-point chances and could convert only two of the eight they created to fall to a 6-1, 7-5 defeat to Darija Jurak of Croatia and Megan Moulton-Levy of the US in 1 hour, 8 minutes.
Chan heads to New York for next week’s US Open, while Jurak and Moulton-Levy face one of two US pairings in the quarter-finals — Alison Riske and Coco Vandeweghe or wild-cards Nicole Gibbs and Grace Min.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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