Youzhny, Almagro win openers in Gstaad

Tennis Betting Lines

07/27/2010 - Gstaad, Switzerland (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Top seeds Mikhail Youzhny of Russia and Nicolas Almagro of Spain were a pair of first-round winners Tuesday at the Swiss Open.

Youzhny rolled past French lucky-loser Marc Gicquel 6-2, 6-2 in 72 minutes, while Almagro held off fellow Spaniard Marcel Granollers 7-6 (7-5), 3-6, 6-3 in 2 hours, 14 minutes on the clay courts at Roy Emerson Arena. Gicquel entered the draw when Kazakhstan's Evgeny Korolev exited it with a back injury.

Up next for Youzhny will be Swiss wild card Alexander Sadecky, while Almagro will encounter a Swiss wild card of his own, Michael Lammer.

Last year's Gstaad titlist, Thomaz Bellucci, went by way of the upset on Day 3, as the third-seeded Brazilian was knocked out in three sets by heavy Swiss crowd favorite Marco Chiudinelli, 7-6 (8-6), 0-6, 6-4, in 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Bellucci beat German Andreas Beck in last year's finale here.

Two other seeds exited the draw on Tuesday, as Spaniard Daniel Gimeno-Traver tripped up No. 6 Romanian Victor Hanescu 6-4, 6-4 and Jeremy Chardy charged past No. 8 fellow Frenchman Paul-Henri Mathieu 6-1, 6-3. The struggling Hanescu was the champion here two years ago, while Mathieu was the Gstaad titlist in 2007.

The 2009 Gstaad runner-up Beck continued his recent success at this event with a 6-3, 6-1 victory over Argentine wild card Agustin Velotti on Tuesday.

Two other opening-round matches saw Finn Jarkko Nieminen edge out Brazil's Thiago Alves 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 and Kazakhstan's Yuri Schukin get past fellow countryman Andrey Golubev 7-6 (7-4), 2-6, 6-3. The 23-year-old Golubev was fresh off his first-ever ATP title, last week in Hamburg.

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.