tennis | Tuesday, May 23, 2023 7:28 AM (Revised at: Tuesday, May 23, 2023 9:03 AM)

Tuesday Tennis Best Bet: WTA French Open, Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova

Jon Reid

Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova Best Bet: Tuesday, May 23rd

Well, that was legitimately as easy as a bet can be, as Anna Lena Friedsam didn’t lose a single game in beating Shuai Zhang to move on in Strasbourg.

For Tuesday’s preview, let’s head to Roland Garros, as the qualifying event for the French Open continues. It’s Tamara Zidansek taking on Nigina Abduraimova that piques the interest from a betting perspective.

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Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova Preview
Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova Best Bet

Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova Preview

May 23rd, 12:00 (UK Time)

Well, talk about two players that prefer totally different conditions and surfaces.

Zidansek – despite being three years younger than Abduraimova – has played over four times as many matches on clay in her professional career.

The 28-year-old is a hard-court specialist through and through and has been scheduling accordingly for years. This season, with the prospect of French Open qualifiers, she has played some clay-court tennis.

That came on the lower-level ITF Tour, where she won a W60 event in Portugal and went to the final of another W60 in France. The problem? She beat a combination of fellow hard courters, young players that are far from being what they should be in the future and some others that are sorely lacking talent on the whole.

Her matches against decent competition on the dirt in 2023? Straight sets losses to the likes of Anastasia Gasanova, Petra Martic, Noma Noha Akugue (another youngster still trying to hone her powerful game), Robin Montgomery (another prospect, with very little experience on clay) and Elsa Jacquemot. Zidansek is a tougher test than many of those women, most of whom beat Abduraimova fairly handily.

As for the Slovenian, we’ve seen her form tail off a bit since she reached the semifinals here at the French Open a few years ago.

That said, she’s always been regarded as a clay-court first kind of player and she isn’t the typical defensive-minded dirtballer, as she can also dictate on her forehand wing.

Her losses this year have all come to better players than her opponent on Tuesday, and the market betting on Abduraimova in the early goings thanks to two rather weak runs at ITF events is misguided in my mind.

Tamara Zidansek vs Nigina Abduraimova Best Bet

Despite the drop in form in the last year or two, Zidansek is still orders of magnitude better on clay than her Uzbek opponent.

The elo ratings – whether raw clay or blended clay – both have her ahead by a substantial margin.

Once you factor in comfort on the surface, experience and quality of opposition for both, this becomes a -5.5-game handicap for me.

At the current number, I think it’s worth a rather large stake. I’ve brought it down a bit just because of Zidansek’s propensity to make a meal of matches she should win easily, but I still trust my numbers enough to back the 25-year-old.