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Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 64
Jiri Lehecka vs 
Toby Samuel
Round of 64
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
My pick: Jiri Lehecka to advance · locked 2026-08-31 03:00 UTCPrediction
Lehecka, but by less than the ranking gap suggests. The 18th seed is a US Open quarter-finalist from a year ago, No. 19 in the world, 26–17 on the season and 110–75 on hard courts across his career; Samuel is a 23-year-old qualifier at No. 110 who had never won a Grand Slam main-draw match before Sunday. What complicates it is how Samuel won that one: 6-2 6-3 6-2 over Tomas Machac, a former world No. 20, in an hour and thirty-two minutes. That is not a scrappy upset, it is a straightforward one — and a player who has just spent 92 minutes beating a top-tier opponent is in an unusually good position two days later. Lehecka needed four sets and a second-set tiebreak to get past Pablo Carreno Busta. The Czech should still win, because five sets is the format that most reliably converts a class gap into a scoreline and he has passed that examination here before. The price will be higher than the seeding line implies.
The case for Jiri Lehecka
70% to winLehecka is the seed, the No. 19, and the only one of the two who has been past the second round of a Grand Slam — he made the quarter-finals here last year. His career hard-court record runs to 110–75 against Samuel's 3–1, which is less a comparison than an absence of evidence on the qualifier's side. Best-of-five rewards the deeper base, and Lehecka has a 26–17 season underneath him.
The case for Toby Samuel
30% to winSamuel beat a former world No. 20 in straight sets in 92 minutes on Sunday, which is the loudest single piece of evidence either man has produced this week. Ranked outside the world's top 1000 little more than a year ago, he has since won four ATP Challenger titles, reached an ATP semi-final at Eastbourne in June, and come through three rounds of qualifying on these courts — four wins at this site in a week against Lehecka's one. He also pushed Jakub Mensik to five sets on his Wimbledon debut, so the long format is not new to him.
Both cases written 2026-08-31, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
Tale of the tape
Jiri LeheckaToby SamuelPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-08-30.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-30.
The briefing
Storylines
- Samuel's 6-2 6-3 6-2 win over Tomas Machac was his first Grand Slam main-draw victory, in his third main draw, and it took 92 minutes.
- The 23-year-old was ranked outside the world's top 1000 a little over a year ago; four Challenger titles and an Eastbourne semi-final later he is No. 110 and through US Open qualifying.
- Lehecka reached the quarter-finals here in 2025 — the deepest run of his career at this tournament — and needed four sets to beat Pablo Carreno Busta on Sunday.
- They have never played.
Head to head
They have never met. Samuel spent the last two seasons on the Challenger tour while Lehecka was playing tour main draws, so there is no tour-level meeting to draw on.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-30.
Watch: Second-round coverage runs across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, with ESPN Deportes in Spanish — and every court streams in the ESPN app, which is where a match away from the two show courts will live. (ESPN press-room release and listings, as of 2026-08-27)
Court & schedule: Not yet assigned. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before, and this match has not reached the board yet. (Official US Open order-of-play release cadence, as of 2026-08-30)
Weather: Rain shapes the opening days. Showers and thunderstorms stay possible through Sunday night under a low near 72°F. Monday is the driest day of the window — partly sunny, high near 77°F, a 20% shower chance before 5 p.m. — before showers return after 8 p.m. Tuesday is warmer and wetter: mostly cloudy near 82°F with a 50% chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly mid-afternoon and again overnight. Wednesday holds near 79°F on the same 50% odds, and Thursday is warmer still — partly sunny, 83°F, storms possible either side of the day. Ashe and Armstrong close their roofs; the field courts wait. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-08-30)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.
At this Stage
The Round of 64 is where a Grand Slam draw stops being a lottery and becomes a tournament. Sixty-four men's matches opened the bracket; thirty-two across Wednesday and Thursday halve what is left, and everyone still here has already won on these courts. Seeds who came through the first round now meet opponents carrying form rather than a ranking.
