Early 2018 brings pre-season tennis tournaments to the first Grand Slam of the season, the Australian Open, which will debut on January 15th. On Thursday, both the ATP and WTA tournaments will be held in the final quarterfinals, and in Shenzen, Irina Begu will face the Hungarian player Timea Babos.

Irina-Camelia Begu
Irina, aged 27, currently occupies 43th place in the WTA circuit of the Simple Sample.
He tries to find a good form before the Australian Open tournament, choosing to participate in the Shenzen tournament in both the singles and the doubles with Simona Halep to have as many matches as possible before the start the Melbourne tournament.
As used in previous years, Irina prefers to start the year with the Chinese tournament and in the first round she managed to eliminate one of the audience favorites, Chinese Liu, with a clear victory in 2 sets, 6-1 6-2 , while in the finals optimum returned from 0-1 to sets against the Russian Alexandrova and imposed 2-1.

Timea Babos
The 24-year-old Hungarian player is ranked 55th in the WTA standings of the singles test.
In the last part of the previous season, Timea Babos took part in tournaments in Dubai and Moscow, where he left the competition from the first round.
As well as Begu, Babos is looking for a better form for this season’s debut, winning the first round at Shenzen 2 clear victory in the first rounds against Chinese Wang and Poles Magda Linette, both ending in a minimum of sets.

Direct meetings
The match in the Shenzen tournament will be the 4th direct confrontation between the two players, the score being 2-1 for Irina, but in the last game, Timea Babos managed to score 2-1 in sets during the tournament in Moscow in 2016

Forecasting Irina Begu – Timea Babos
Beginning of the season, the two players will try to find their pace and some mistakes will be seen in both players.
Timea Babos started as a favorite in this match, showing a solid game against a Chinese and Polish Linette, losing only a few games in these games, while Irina Begu encountered problems in the first set against Alexandrova.
The forecast of this match is a balanced match, like the other direct games, which ended in 3 sets, being extremely balanced matches, and at the moment both players are in a very good shape.

Our Prediction: Over 19,5 games @ 1.53