Paris Masters Day One Tips: Fucsovics can compete with Coric

Tricky card to begin the Paris Masters

We have the final major main tour tennis tournament of 2020 taking place this week in Paris, with first round matches getting underway at 10:00 UK time (you can read my outright preview here). There's a tricky card on the opening day with the market doing a pretty solid job of accurately pricing today's matches, although there are a couple of spots I think are worth discussing.

Fucsovics can keep it close against Coric

In the opening match of the schedule, Marton Fucsovics faces Borna Coric and I'm surprised to see Fucsovics as big as 3.002/1 against the talented but inconsistent Coric, who has rather underwhelmed my prediction of him being a consistent top 10 player a few years back. The 15th seed is still ranked outside the top 20, and I think the market might be influenced by him reaching the final of St Petersburg indoors several weeks ago, where he lost to the impressive Andrey Rublev.

A loss to Rublev is no shame, and neither was his tight defeat to Novak Djokovic last week in Vienna, but I'm not sure I've seen enough from Coric to suggest that he should be as short as 1.4840/85 here against a competent opponent.

Fucsovics has qualified to be here and his qualifying win over Vasek Pospisil in fairly quick conditions is a pretty solid win in itself and since the tour resumed he's got wins over Daniil Medvedev and Grigor Dimitrov (twice) so he's clearly not playing at a bad level. His main tour record since August is 7-4, which isn't bad at all.

Last year in St Petersburg the duo met (Coric won in three sets via retirement) and Coric's price that day was a 1.804/5 favourite, and I'd suggest that this is more in line with my expectations here as well. Fucsovics +1.5 sets is a general market price of around 1.738/11 and this could be a viable option here.

Moutet can get the better of Caruso

I also quite like home wild card Corentin Moutet for his match against the lucky loser, Salvatore Caruso. The Frenchman is a marginal 1.9010/11 favourite to get the win here, and although he's struggled to make an impression at main tour level in matches since the US Open, he's been underdog in the majority of those matches.

Caruso, who lost to Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in qualifying but picked up a lucky loser berth, is a decent downgrade on much of those opposition, and Moutet has better indoor stats at Challenger level in the last 12-24 months. I have him priced as a reasonably solid favourite and this looks the only other real potential value spot today.

However, on a tough day one I think it's probably pretty wise to be cautious from a staking perspective, but if you can get around the 1.738/11 mark on Fucsovics on the set handicap that is my preferred spot.

Bonzi with a great chance of first indoor win on the main tour

In other matches, there's some interesting matches for the neutral with former venue winner Karen Khachanov a 1.635/8 favourite over the high potential Davidovich Fokina, while Felix Auger-Aliassime against Marin Cilic is another headline battle. There's also some matches with lower quality expectations, with clay-courter Marco Cecchinato and Norbert Gombos battling for a round two spot, and Benjamin Bonzi playing his first main tour indoor match of his career. I'd suggest he won't get many better opportunities to get that first surface victory than today, where he faces qualifier Federico Coria, who is much more comfortable on a slow clay court.

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