Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari Prediction 8/10/2025 Today’s Tennis Picks

Number 7 seed Jasmine Paolini will face former Top 10 player Maria Sakkari in the second round of the 2025 Cincinnati Open. The match is scheduled for Sunday, August 10. Here’s our Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari prediction. This preview will also include a Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari pick.

Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari Preview

Jasmine Paolini enters the 2025 Cincinnati Open as the seventh seed. The Italian fell to ninth in the WTA rankings after losing most of her Wimbledon runner-up points in July. Paolini’s Top 10 status will come under threat this summer as she defends fourth-round points at the US Open, but she can gain points in Cincinnati, where she was beaten in the round of 16 last season. That was one of three main draw appearances she’s had in this tournament dating back to 2021. Her best result was a quarterfinal run in 2023 as a qualifier.

Paolini has endured some poor results this year, most notably in the last two months, where she lost six matches. One of those was a heartbreaking fourth-round loss at Roland Garros, where she had match points against Svitolina. She has since lost twice to a couple of massive underdogs, including in Montreal, where she began her hard-court swing in North America with a defeat to Japan’s Aoi Ito.

Maria Sakkari is unseeded in Cincinnati, but the Greek is a former Top 10 player, reaching a career-high ranking of No. 3 not long ago. But Sakkari has been a different player since a shoulder injury caused a premature end to her 2024 season. She retired from last year’s US Open and took four months to recover.

Sakkari didn’t have a great start to the year in Australia, where she won one main draw match in three tournaments. The situation hardly got better until the clay court season, where she produced a proper run in Madrid, winning three successive matches for the first time this season. In that week, she beat Jasmine Paolini. But Sakkari could not sustain that form for the remainder of the clay season and grass, where she struggled to progress beyond the second round.

Sakkari appears to have turned a corner since the North American hard-court swing began in Washington. She reached her second quarterfinal of 2025 and managed a high-quality win over Emma Navarro there. This week, Sakkari picked up her fourth win of this swing in Cincinnati, seeing off Kamilla Rakhimova in three sets.

Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari Head-To-Head

Sakkari leads Jasmine Paolini 2-1 in the head-to-head. Both of Sakkari’s wins came on clay, while Paolini won their only hard-court meeting during her breakout run in Dubai last season.

Jasmine Paolini vs Maria Sakkari Prediction

I’m on Sakkari with the plus money here. Granted she’s not had a banner year, I don’t believe Sakkari just became a bad player overnight after a difficult 2025. She was returning from a troublesome shoulder injury, but she’s made sporadic progress recently. Paolini, while still fortunate to hold onto her Top 10 ranking, has had some shambolic results lately, making Sakkari’s pre-match odds a very attractive pick in this match.

Nur Said's Pick: Maria Sakkari in three sets