Former World No. 7 Fernando Verdasco battled to a confidence-boosting win on Wednesday at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, edging fellow Spaniard and sixth seed Roberto Bautista Agut 6-4, 3-6, 7-5 to reach the quarter-finals.

Since reaching the semi-finals in the first week of the season at the Qatar ExxonMobil Open in Doha (l. to Djokovic after holding five match points), the left-hander had won just one match in three tournaments. But he toughed out victory over Bautista Agut in two hours and 26 minutes, breaking in the final game to seal the win.

“With him, until the last point you have to have unbelievable focus and fight every point,” said Verdasco. “That’s what I did, and I’m very happy that I went through and I’m in the quarter-finals for the first time here.

“Always beating these kind of players gives me confidence. They give you unbelievable rhythm, and it’s always good for your game.”

The 33-year-old Verdasco goes on to face Gael Monfils or Daniel Evans.

Seventh seed Lucas Pouille kept up his good run of form, defeating qualifier Marius Copil 6-1, 6-4 in 59 minutes. The Frenchman is coming off a runner-up showing at the Open 13 Marseille (l. to Tsonga). He could next face seven-time Dubai champion Roger Federer, should the Swiss beat Evgeny Donskoy.

Philipp Kohlschreiber set a potential quarter-final clash with top seed Andy Murray as he defeated #NextGenATP Russian Daniil Medvedev 6-4, 6-4. Murray faces Guillermo Garcia-Lopez this evening.

Marin Cilic earned his first win at the Abierto Mexicano Telcel in Acapulco on Tuesday. The third seed knocked out Buenos Aires titlist Alexandr Dolgopolov 6-3, 4-6, 6-0. Cilic hit 14 aces and won more than 70 per cent of his service points during the 90-minute win.

The 28-year-old Croatian had lost his opener last year to American Ryan Harrison. Cilic will meet countryman and #NextGenATP player Borna Coric in the second round.

Cilic is one of four Top 10 players at the ATP World Tour 500 event, and two more will be in action tonight, including top seed Novak Djokovic and second seed Rafael Nadal.

The Top 20 players in the world average a losing record holding serve from the precarious scoreline of 0/30.

The game is potentially half over, and for the majority at this elite level, their chances of holding serve have already dropped below 50 per cent. An Infosys ATP Beyond The Numbers analysis of the Top 20 from the 2016 season at 0/30, and the two nearby scorelines of 15/30 and 0/40, provide a fresh perspective of just how tough it is to hold serve once you fall behind by two points on the scoreboard.

The Top 20 average holding serve 49 per cent of the time from 0/30. American John Isner leads the field, holding a mind-blowing 70 per cent of the time. Others ahead of the pack include Ivo Karlovic (66 per cent), Stan Wawrinka (61 per cent) and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (56 per cent).

The volatility of 0/30 sees a massive 46 percentage-point gap between Isner’s leading 70 per cent, and David Goffin, who managed to win only 34 per cent of his service games when falling behind 0/30.

The Best Among The Top 20 In 2016

If the Top 20 won the 0/30 point, their chances of holding serve jumped sharply from 49 per cent to 64 per cent – a significant 15 percentage-point leap that now has every player in the Top 20 statistically favored to hold serve.

World No. 1 Andy Murray was slightly above the Top 20 average from 15/30, holding 65 per cent of the time, as was No. 2 Novak Djokovic (66 per cent), No. 3 Milos Raonic (70 per cent) and No. 4 Stan Wawrinka (68 per cent).

If the Top 20 lost the 0/30 point to drop to 0/40, their win percentage of holding serve plummeted down to 22 per cent. No Top 20 players won more games than they lost from this deep hole.

The best performer of the Top 20 holding serve from 0/40 in 2016 was Gael Monfils, who held 12 of 28 times for a commanding 43 per cent average. Kei Nishikori was another stand-out from 0/40, holding 28 per cent of the time, as was Nick Kyrgios at 25 per cent.

It is interesting to see the sizable fluctuations in players’ fortunes of holding serve from either 15/30 or 0/40. Both Murray and Karlovic had a sizable 55 percentage-point difference of holding between the two scorelines, with Tomas Berdych close at 51 percentage points. The smallest gap by far was Monfils, at only 13 percentage points – 56 per cent at 15/30 to 43 per cent at 0/40.

Tennis is a game of feel and touch, but it’s also a game of patterns and percentages, and the more we know about these crucial scorelines, the easier it will be to successfully navigate them in the future.

Andy Murray looked in fine form and fully recovered from his short bout with shingles during his Dubai opener on Tuesday. The top seed coasted past Tunisia’s Malek Jaziri 6-4, 6-1 in 79 minutes at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships to win their first FedEx ATP Head2Head meeting.

“I have never hit with him or played against him before. It took a little bit of time to get used to his game. But I played better as the match went on,” Murray said.

The Scot landed only 40 per cent of his first serves but overcame the low percentage by defending his second serve well, taking nearly 70 per cent of those points (19/29). Murray was broken once but converted four of his eight break-point opportunities against the 33-year-old Jaziri, who reached the Dubai quarter-finals in 2014.

“The only thing I didn’t do well was the first serve… I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe first match under the lights, haven’t practised in those conditions since I have been here,” Murray said.

The World No. 1 will next meet Spaniard Guillermo Garcia-Lopez. The Brit leads their FedEx ATP Head2Head series 2-1, but they haven’t played since the 2012 BNP Paribas Open.

Win or lose, Murray is thankful to be healthy. He discovered that he had shingles, or adult chickenpox, upon returning from the Australian Open last month. He shared how he learned of the illness on Tuesday with reporters in Dubai.

“I had a little bit of a rash basically like on my bum ’round to kind of my stomach, and it wasn’t terrible. But then normally if you have a little bit of a rash and you scratch it, it feels better. But with that, it was really, really painful.

“I didn’t think much of it at the beginning, and then it was actually my wife’s mum, we were having dinner, and I was, like, ‘This is really irritating’. She was, like, ‘Pull your pants down. Show me. It might be shingles,’” Murray said to laughs.

“I was, like, ‘OK’. Then the next day, got a doctor, and she was right.”

Murray continued, saying his wife’s mum probably guessed shingles because her son Scott had experienced the illness in the past. “It’s quite strange,” Murray said of the illness, “because it comes in like an arc and it doesn’t go past the centre of your body. It stays on one side.”

Murray fans shouldn’t worry, though. He said he took some anti-viral medicine and applied a cream, and that he’s all better.

“The rash is completely gone now, and I felt fine when I was training. I don’t think I’d be able to do what I was doing out there this evening if [I still had it],” he said. “A lot of people said that afterwards, once the rash is gone, that you can feel very tired for quite a few weeks, a number of weeks afterwards. I was maybe a little bit more tired than usual at the beginning, but I really feel fine now.”