The 2017 WTA Zhengzhou Biyuan Cup is part of the WTA’s lower-tier series. It’s not part of the international level or any of the other tournaments which offer at least 250 points to the winner. This is a small-point, small-dollar tournament, but it offers WTA professionals ranked outside the top 60 a chance to climb their way up the board, playing outside the ITF circuit at a slightly higher level.
The competition in the 32-player event begins on Monday, April 17.
Event Details
Event: WTA Zhengzhou Biyuan Cup
Category: WTA 125 Series
Date: April 17 – 23, 2017
Location: Zhengzhou, China
The 2017 WTA Biyuan Cup, as a result of being part of the WTA 125 series, will not be a magnet event on the tour, given that it exists in something of a middle layer between the normal tour events and the ITF circuit.
With a prize money allotment of just $115,000, split among 32 players, the paychecks for early-round losers are going to be extremely small. Only the runner-up and champion are going to pocket an amount of money which will make them feel this week in China was worth their while.
The points structure for this event:
Championship: 160 points
Runner-up: 95
Semifinals: 57
Quarterfinals: 29
Former Champions and Results:
This is the first year in which this event is a WTA-sanctioned event. Its previous three versions were as a part of the ITF circuit. As such, there is no history of this event as a WTA competition.
Player Info:
Here’s a look at the top eight seeds in Zhengzhou:
Wang Qiang is the number one seed. For a tournament with a bigger profile in one of the higher classifications on the WTA Tour, a No. 1 seed would probably be somewhere in the top 30 to 35 of the rankings, but in this case, Qiang is number 62, and has never won a single WTA title. She has won 13 ITF singles events to push her ranking upward. She was not able to qualify for the Australian Open and has few WTA events on her ledger this year. However, she was able to qualify for the main draw at both Indian Wells and Miami. She won one main-draw match in each tournament before losing in the round of 64. She was able to push herself to her No. 62 ranking on the basis of each of those first-round wins. This is the top seed at a tournament, which offers perspective on the kind of field you will see at a WTA 125 series event.
Duan Ying-Ying is the second seed. Born in the 1980s (1989), Duan is likely closer to the end of her career than its beginning, and yet she has not yet accumulated $1 million in career earnings. Ranked at 63, she has won one WTA event in her career and – similar to Qiang – has collected a double-figure amount of ITF titles (11), but she has not been as consistent as Qiang. Considering her ranking, she has had a decent year on the main tour. She is 7-6 overall after going 7-5 on the hard courts. She has lost her only clay court match so far. That’s not bad and is about where she normally is. She was 8-7 on the main tour last year and 8-8 the year before. She doesn’t typically play much on the clay and grass, but she’s only notched seven wins this year, which is one short of her career-high in main tour draws.
Nao Hibino of Japan is the third seed. She is just 3-4 on the main tour this year. She was just 16-21 in main tour matchups last year but was 8-3 the year before. The competition here won’t be too strenuous, so this could be one of the tournaments where she manages to go a little bit deeper in toe the event.
Zheng Saisai is fourth. Kurumi Nara is fifth, Zhang Kai-Lin sixth. Han Xinyun is the seventh seed, and Zarina Diyas of Kazakhstan is the eighth seed. Diyas is the only player not from China or Japan to be a seeded player, an indication of how localized this event is and how much it lacks broader global representation.
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