The third day of competition began without any major surprises, with the eight mixed preliminary groups. All eight top seeds advanced to the main round, although only five of them did so as group winners. Only three pairs remain without losing a single game – Silke Kind/Thorsten Flues (GER), Rie Koyama/Hamid Ezzat-Ahmadi (JPN/USA) and Melanie Jeska/Norbert Hase (GER). Top seeds Margie Alley/Ilya Rozenblat (USA) had to fight hard and lost at least one game in each match.
This means that all preliminary round groups have now been completed. In the two largest men’s classes, 2 and 3, the singles finals have already started with the round of the best 64. Since today, only the 22 tables in the main hall have been in use in Lignano, while the 14 tables in the orange room and blue room have been open for training.
Of the participants who competed in all three events – singles, doubles and mixed doubles – only one managed not to drop a single game: World Champion Melanie Jeska currently has a 9-0 and 27-0 record and still has a good chance of returning home as world champion, as she did last year. While the women have a maximum of 12 matches left to play, the men have as many as 15.