Cristian Garin vs Alex Michelsen Prediction, Expert Picks, Odds, H2H, April 17th

The third preview of the day heads to one of the two ATP 250 tournaments taking place this week in Munich. It’s our Garin vs Michelsen prediction from the BMW Open. Michelsen’s win probability comes in at 31% while Garin is favored to win at 1.39 odds. The handicap is 3.5 games and the total games line is 21.5.

Garin vs Michelsen Prediction: Oppose American on Unfamiliar European Red Clay

• Prediction: Garin -3.5 Games & -4 Games
• Best Odds: 1.81 & 2.06
• Bookmaker: Pinnacle
• Stakes: 3/10 & 2/10

Odds as at 1:30 am UK Time on April 17th, 2024. Odds may now differ.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. Michelsen is not very good on clay. Mainly because he’s played so little at the professional level on the surface. And when he has, it was on the green clay in his native USA, which tends to play differently than the more traditional red clay.

A few weeks ago, this would have been simply opposing Michelsen. With the way Garin has been playing – especially on return – this can also be looked at as backing a clay courter finding his feet at the right time. Let’s do the same thing as we did in another preview (which you can find on the expert insights page) and create a -3.75 game handicap.

Read on for more expert insights.

Cristian Garin Recent Form

After an extended period of struggling to find form, the Chilean has used the last month to build some form. He’s playing some pretty decent tennis at the moment.

He managed to reach the quarterfinals at a Challenger in Girona, Spain, before making the semis in Estoril, Portugal. He’s already won a match against the crafty Dominik Koepfer this week in Munich.

Overall, he’s 6-2 in his last eight matches on the dirt and two or three of those matches came at a lower level. They’re still applicable to this match, considering how poor and inexperienced his opponent is on the dirt.

His serve has been a bit of a liability at times in those weeks and that is the lone concern for me in the matchup. But, his return game has been firing on all cylinders and Michelsen’s decent first serve should be blunted by the colder weather, clay courts, and Garin’s proficiency on return.

If we don’t see several games per set where Garin generates break-point opportunities, I’d be pretty surprised.

Alex Michelsen Recent Form

Michelsen has had a fairly decent year for a 19-year-old trying to make his way playing full-time on the main tour. There aren’t a lot of deep runs on his resume. But I don’t think he or his team would be upset with a third-round appearance at a grand slam and then a quarterfinal at a 250 as well.

Those were both on hard courts though, and the shift to clay courts is where the concern comes into play. He won his first match here in straight sets, but he did so against a player who is primarily seen at the ITF level, has had almost all his success indoors where his powerful, but erratic game can succeed, and who tends to his a lot of unforced errors.

Wednesday will be a much tougher test and with so little to go on in terms of play on clay courts, I can’t have him being an underdog of under four games.

Garin vs Michelesen H2H – Stat of the Match

No prior head-to-head record to go on with these two guys. Even statistically there is very little to go on since Michelsen has played fewer than 10 matches in his career on red clay.

Perhaps that lack of data is why the market is struggling so much to price this up properly and is tending to trust Michelsen a bit more than I am. Knowing how he looked in qualifying last week and his results on the red dirt, this appears to be too tough a task for the American.

Safer Gambling

At bettingexpert, we always take a safe approach to gambling. We’ll never bet more than we can afford or chase losses. For more advice, head to our Safer Gambling hub.