Bernard Tomic vs Blake Ellis Prediction, Odds, Best Bets - Brisbane Challenger 75

Blake Ellis beat Bernard Tomic in their only meeting, in Noumea in January, and he arrives in Brisbane off two long weeks of winning on the Futures circuit. Tomic, the No. 5 seed, has not played a full match since October 8. The level gap says one thing; the last month says another.

The Matchup

The Brisbane Challenger is a Challenger 75 on the ATP Challenger Tour, played on outdoor hard courts at the Queensland Tennis Centre, and this first round match pairs the No. 5 seed with a wildcard entry. Bernard Tomic is ranked No. 181 and owns four ATP Tour titles and a career high of No. 17, reached a decade ago.

His season record is 33-26, and it includes a Challenger title in Lincoln in July. Blake Ellis, the wildcard, is ranked No. 412 and has gone 28-22 this season, almost all of it on the ITF circuit a level below this event.

Ellis has the one result in this matchup that neither ranking explains. The only time they have met, in the quarterfinals at the Noumea Challenger on January 8, Ellis won 7-6(4), 3-6, 6-4 on an outdoor hard court, and he did it with his serve: 21 aces, and 86 percent of his first serve points won.

The games finished level at 16 apiece, which is another way of saying Tomic was one loose service game from winning a match he is now priced to control. Ellis had just turned 27 that week and is in his prime years; that win was no junior's fluke.

What Ellis has been doing lately is winning. He has won seven of his last ten matches, all on hard courts at the M25 event in Tamworth across the last two weeks, where he reached a final and then a semifinal in consecutive weeks.

Tomic's recent weeks are the opposite: he lost in straight sets to Matteo Arnaldi in the first round in Shanghai on October 8, and his last match, against Dane Sweeny in Jinan on October 13, ended with the score at 2-2 in the first set. He has not played since. One man arrives match tough at a lower level; the other arrives rested, at least, and with the better career behind him.

Key Factors

The level gap is the argument, and it is a real one. Tomic has won 61 percent of his career hard court matches, 335 wins against 210 losses, against fields that include the main tour. Ellis's career hard court record is 57 percent, 231 wins against 177 losses, built almost entirely below Challenger level, and the best wins of his career have come against players ranked No. 146 and No. 154. When Ellis has stepped up to this level, January's win over Tomic is the exception in his record, not the pattern.

The serve decides whether the exception repeats. Ellis hit 21 aces in Noumea because Tomic's return position gives big servers room to work, and if Ellis serves at that level again, he can hold his way to tiebreaks and keep the games margin inside the number. Tomic's counter is patience: he does not need to break often, because one break per set against a player ranked outside the top 400 is the normal shape of this match across his career, and his sliced backhand keeps Ellis from stepping into the court the way he did in Tamworth.

The honest counterpoint is Ellis himself. He has already beaten Tomic on this surface this year, he is the player in form, and Tomic's last month, a first round loss in Shanghai and a match that stopped at 2-2 in Jinan, gives no evidence that he is sharp or even fully fit. If the Jinan stoppage was his body talking, an in-form Ellis who believes he owns this matchup is a live underdog, and the pick is asking Tomic to prove his level in his first full match in a month.

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