Third seed and 2016 finalist Grigor Dimitrov started his China Open campaign with a 7-5, 6-3 victory over American lucky loser Tennys Sandgren on Tuesday over 83 minutes. The Bulgarian, who is hoping to finish the season strongly, recorded his 15th hard-court match win of 2018 (23-16 overall) and will now prepare to face Serbia’s Dusan Lajovic in the second round.

“It’s never easy when you’ve never played against a guy,” said Dimitrov. “So I think it took me quite a few games to kind of get in a rhythm, see what kind of game plan he had [and] just try to get comfortable in the match. I think the first set was obviously the tough set. After that, I kind of picked up my pace a little bit more, I started playing a little bit more aggressive. I think, also, I was moving well.”

Dimitrov opened a 5-2 lead in the first set, but had his serve broken in the ninth game. He converted his fourth set point opportunity to break Sandgren, a late replacement for Ryan Harrison, for the 43-minute opener and then took firm control by winning the first three games of the second set. Harrison pulled out prior to the match due to a back injury.

Spain’s Fernando Verdasco is one win from reaching the Beijing quarter-finals for the third time (2009 and 2011) after scraping past Gael Monfils, the Frenchman making his debut at the tournament, 2-6, 7-6(3), 7-6(5) in two hours and 23 minutes. Verdasco recovered from 0/4 down in the deciding set tie-break and now awaits the winner of sixth-seeded American Jack Sock and Nikoloz Basilashvili of Georgia.

Fabrice Martin and Gilles Simon arrived in Tokyo having played doubles together just once before, a first-round loss in Paris two years ago. But after winning two qualifying matches, they shocked top seeds Henri Kontinen and John Peers 3-6, 7-6(4), 10-7 on Monday evening to reach the second round of the Rakuten Japan Open Tennis Championships 2018.

“First of all I’m very happy to be playing with Gilles,” Martin said. “We had some good matches in qualies and today, I played them actually in the US Open and won with Jeremy Chardy so we had a plan coming onto the court and it kind of worked. It was really close at the end, but we’re very happy to go through this match.”

The Frenchmen did well to protect their serves, not double-faulting throughout the whole match. While they were broken twice — including once in the second set — they did well to force a Match Tie-break. Once there, Kontinen double-faulted twice and Peers did so once, putting the favoured team in too much difficulty to overcome.

What makes the victory even more impressive is that Simon does not play much doubles. In fact, he had done so only twice this year. But he loves competing with friends, making the victory even sweeter.

“It’s a lot of pressure also on my side because it’s his job, he’s a doubles player and he wants to perform,” Simon said. “I focus on singles, but I still want to do very good for him and I am so happy that we were able to win and go through to the second round. That’s amazing.”

The No. 2 seeds Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares, who reached last year’s final, ousted Divij Sharan and Artem Sitak 6-3, 7-5. The British-Brazilian duo won 77 per cent of their service points en route to a 68-minute victory.