We arrived in the third pitching week with the 500 tournament in Rio (Brazil) won last August by Dominic Thiem without losing sets. Right now Thiem is the best clay player after Nadal and with the conquest last week in the Argentine tournament and there without missing a set, it shows that it is very difficult to compete with the great game he does on this surface. In 4 the fourth is with Serbian Lajovic in the 1 round and is expected to win as well as last year's 2 round with a victory of Thiem 2-0 (6-2, 7-5), nothing but this year's Serb! In 2, he will have an opponent between Andujar and Melzer, with his brother Jurgen Melzer doing two very good appearances on this surface for the last two years and being in the 100 World Ranking. Logically we will have an Austrian fight in the 2 round with Andujar being lost from the map in recent years and ahead of a challenger, Melzer had won him 2-0 sets. I count him as a rival to Melzer and I think he is within his ability to get sets from Thiem but not to win it as he had done in years when Thiem was not at the top level 2013-2015. In the quarter-finals he will have an opponent between Verdasco-Mayer and Estrella-Kicker, with 1 winning couple taking the lead and here Mayer is a great opponent for a set like this 2014-2015 was competing against Thiem. Verdasco, as the most experienced player of all, is capable of the best and the worst at all times and you can not predict anything, I just hope he is not in his best day because the only difficulty that Thiem can encounter is the excellent Verdasco game if it reaches the quarter-finals. My choice will be to win them too 3 παιχνίδια on 4 fourth given to odds 1.70 on stoiximan and the bet will go up 6/10 due to the reliability of the bet and the factor Thiem on dirt surfaces. Perhaps if Verdasco did not even think of a bigger bet!