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Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 64
Jiri Lehecka vs Toby Samuel — 6-4 6-2 6-4
 Jiri Lehecka✓ | 6 | 6 | 6 |
 Toby Samuel | 4 | 2 | 4 |
Final · Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · Round of 64
Result
Jiri Lehecka needed 1hr 48min on Court 5 to end Toby Samuel's first US Open main draw. It began badly for the 18th seed: broken from 40-0 in his opening service game, 0-3 down, and then a heavy fall on his right wrist while returning — a spill iSport's live blog flagged with Czechia's Davis Cup tie against the United States under three weeks away. He was unhurt, and took five games in a row to turn the set around. Lehecka dropped serve again at the start of the third but broke straight back, and from 3-4 he lost one point the rest of the way, breaking to love and finishing with an ace out wide. The numbers frame the gap: Samuel, a qualifier ranked 110th who had beaten Tomas Machac for his first Grand Slam main-draw win, hit more winners, 28 to 24, but made 41 unforced errors to 19 and took two of three break points to the seed's six of eleven. “It would be a good test to see where I'm at against those top guys,” Samuel had said beforehand.
Jiri LeheckaRows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
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.
Jiri Lehecka✓Toby SamuelRound of 128
Round of 64
What we know now
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
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.
My locked pick: Jiri Lehecka to advance ✓ RIGHT
“A quarter-finalist here a year ago against a qualifier with four career tour-level hard-court matches — but the 92-minute win over Machac is why the split isn't wider.”
Locked 2026-08-31 03:00 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Jiri LeheckaToby SamuelPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-30.
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.
Court & schedule: Court 5, Wednesday 2 September. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-02)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.