Game, Set, Bet, presented by BetMGM: Belinda Bencic vs. Caroline Garcia, Adelaide

Game, Set, Bet—presented by BetMGM: The top women's fliers and fades

The Adelaide International 2 quarterfinals feature some mouthwatering match-ups on the women’s side, and we’re particularly interested in a meeting between world No. 13 Belinda Bencic and world No. 4 Caroline Garcia. Both players struggled to begin last season, but they ended up finding their form in the second half. For Garcia, that’s an understatement, as she won three WTA titles and then went on to win the WTA Finals. But the point is that both eventually found themselves and are looking to make a splash early in the new season. And we have a pretty good feeling about Bencic being the one to emerge from this match-up.

While Garcia won one of the bigger prizes of 2022, in Fort Worth, she's the one that looks a bit shakier at the moment. While Garcia emerged as the winner against Katerina Siniakova in her first match this week, it took her three sets to do so. She really didn’t look all that comfortable returning Siniakova’s serve, which isn’t a good thing when you consider that Bencic is a lot more dangerous with the ball on her racquet.

Bencic has an 82.5% hold percentage to start the year, and she was at 75.0% or higher throughout each of the previous two seasons. The Swiss star has been rock-solid on serve, and she should be able to hold with relative ease against Garcia. That’s very important when you also factor in that Bencic is a little sturdier from the baseline. Garcia has all the power in the world, but she can occasionally get off-balance and begin to spray errors. We saw a little of that against Siniakova, but it simply won’t fly against a player of Bencic’s caliber.

Bencic also happens to have a higher Elo rating than Garcia in hard-court play, and the three-month trend filter on Universal Tennis also reveals that she has a slight edge in UTR rating.

With that said, we’re urging you to ignore the players' WTA rankings in this one. The on-court matchup favors Bencic, and it doesn’t hurt that she won in straight sets in their only previous meeting—a 7-6 (2), 6-3 win at Wimbledon in 2018. It's just hard to pass up taking Bencic here, even if Garcia may be the trendier pick. There’s a reason Bencic is favored, and the oddsmakers likely want you to jump on the plus-money number for Garcia.

Bet: Bencic To Win (-125)