👋 Welcome back to The Daily Theory, our morning rundown to help you stay on top of your favorite sport. I’m Allen McDuffee, your guide to all things tennis.

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Three Points

🎾 Upset City: If you were off enjoying your weekend and missed all of Cincinnati, let’s get you updated: All of the seeds have lost... (jkjkjkjkjkjk). But there was serious carnage in both the men’s and women’s draws over the weekend. Here’s a rundown of which seeds went down in the last two days:

  • Women: Diana Shnaider, Beatriz Haddad Maia, Liudmila Samsonova, Magdalena Frech, Leylah Fernandez, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Elina Svitolina, Sofia Kenin, Linda Noskova, Daria Kasatkina, Emma Navarro, Belinda Bencic
  • Men: Flavio Cobolli, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Tomas Machac, Lorenzo Musetti, Casper Ruud, Denis Shapovalov, Tallon Griekspoor, Daniil Medvedev, Cameron Norrie, Alex de Minaur, Luciano Darderi
  • Remaining seed count: Going into the third round, the women have 20 of 32 seeds remaining, while the men have 20 of 32 left.

🎾 Out of the Blockx: Court Theory readers love a heads up on rising players. Consider this one: Belgium’s Alexander Blockx. Although I’ve mentioned him in passing before, this is a call for your full attention. The 20-year-old has mostly been playing on the ATP Challenger Tour, dipping his toe into the main tour sporadically over the last 18 months or so — and he’s showing exactly how much he belongs already. Blockx has got big game, all the shots, and a super-competitor’s spirit. With a bit more time for his body to fill out and experience against the world’s top players, there’s little doubt he’ll rise to the top.

  • In Cincy: Now, ranked 119 in the world, he took out Marcos Giron in the first round, and 27th seed Brandon Nakashima needed a third-set tiebreak to narrowly escape last night.
  • One to read: The ATP published a nice feature on Blockx’s backstory last year as he started winning on the ATP Challenger Tour.
  • Next: Blockx is next set to play in the qualifying of the U.S. Open.

🎾 You okay, bro?: Stefanos Tsitsipas, the social media poet laureate of tennis, was in his feelings at <checks timestamp> nearly 4:00 am on Monday morning, posting on X, “I’m not high maintenance, I just have taste.”

Given that he has his third-round match against world number 63 Benjamin Bonzi in a matter of hours, we take this as not a very good sign of the state of mind of Tsitsipas.

It’s not at all clear what Tsitsipas is referencing, but we have our guesses...