Week in Preview: Moscow, Luxembourg, Vienna, Stockholm

"This final week of regular season play is shaping up to be the tensest in WTA 'her story,'" the website of the women's tour informed us on Monday. I’m not sure about her-story, let alone his-tory, but with just a few days left before the WTA Finals in Singapore, five women—Angelique Kerber, Lucie Safarova, Flavia Pennetta, Carla Suarez Navarro, and Karolina Pliskova—are vying for the final three spots. Here’s a look at how that race may end, and where the men are on the road to their own year-ender in London next month. There may be a shortage of stars this week, but there’s no shortage of tournaments—or banks to sponsor them.

Moscow
$768,000; Premier
Indoor hard court
Draw is here

Live by the race, die by the race. As the last Premier event before Singapore, Moscow has attracted a solid lineup of players on the bubble: Pennetta, Safarova, Suarez Navarro, and Pliskova are all here. One of their colleagues, though, top seed Agnieszka Radwanska, bailed when she burst through the bubble last week and qualified. Another, the fourth-seeded Kerber, did the same when she all-but-qualified. The only way the German doesn’t make it to Singapore is if Suarez Navarro wins Moscow. That seems unlikely, considering that the Spaniard hasn’t been past the round of 16 at any event since Birmingham in June.

Otherwise, Safarova clinches by reaching the quarterfinals, and Pennetta clinches by reaching the semis, provided Suarez Navarro doesn’t win it all.

Luxembourg
$256,818; International
Indoor hard court
Draw is here

Timea Bacsinszky, the top seed, sits at No. 9 in the race, and will most likely head for Singapore as the first alternate. A chance to play there would be a fitting reward for one of the year’s most improved players and pleasantly surprising stories. Competition will come from No. 2 seed Ana Ivanovic, No. 3 Sara Errani, and No. 5 Jelena Jankovic, who won a title over the weekend in Hong Kong. That’s going to require quite a recovery effort, but this is how JJ lives her life.

Already out: Sloane Stephens, to Mona Barthel; Andrea Petkovic, to Misaki Doi

Vienna
$1,976,813; 500 ranking points
Indoor Rebound Ace
Draw is here

Vienna, a 500-level tournament, is the most point-laden event of the week on the ATP calendar. Hence the presence of three players who are still active in the race to London: David Ferrer, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, and Kevin Anderson.

One of those players, Ferrer, is more in the race than the other two. He currently holds the eighth and final spot; despite a surge by Tsonga at Metz and Shanghai this month, the Frenchman remains 1,000 points behind the Spaniard.

Race implications or not, Vienna has a watchable, if combustible, draw. As of this writing, Monfils, Fognini, Thiem, Gulbis, Haas, Dolgopolov, and Isner were still in the field.

Stockholm, Sweden
$608,360; 250 ranking points
Indoor hard court
Draw is here

A tournament named after a Kipling poem, or a twisted public-school movie starring Malcolm McDowell, instead of a bank? No, not quite. "If" is, in case you hadn’t guessed from the other title sponsors this week, a Scandinavian financial services firm.

The company has helped contribute to the healthy purse in its hometown, but it couldn’t do anything about matching Vienna as far as ranking points. The upshot is that, of the week’s three tournaments, Stockholm has the second-best draw. Tomas Berdych, Richard Gasquet, Gilles Simon, Grigor Dimitrov, Jack Sock, and a newly and fairly respectable Bernard Tomic lead the field. Berdych has clinched his spot in London, while Gasquet still has an outside—far outside—chance.

Also here: Thanasi Kokkinakis

Moscow
$698,325; 250 ranking points
Indoor hard court
Draw is here

With just 250 points to offer the winner, the Kremlin Cup loses out in the second-tier sweepstakes to Vienna and Stockholm. Marin Cilic and Roberto Bautista Agut lead a field in which no one has a chance to make it to London.

For future reference: Two hot-shot teenagers, Andrey Rublev and Borna Coric, are in the draw. Though after writing Coric’s name so many times this season, I’m already starting to think of the 18-year-old Croat as a grizzled veteran. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or a bad sign for him.