Dementieva wins Pilot Pen opener

Tennis Betting Lines

08/23/2010 - New Haven, CT (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Two-time Grand Slam runner-up Elena Dementieva was among Monday's opening-round winners at the $600,000 Pilot Pen Tennis event, a final hardcourt U.S. Open tune-up.

The fourth-seeded Dementieva flew past Spaniard Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez 6-1, 6-2 at the Connecticut Tennis Center at Yale.

Rain washed away Sunday's schedule here and interrupted the start of play Monday.

Slovakian lucky-loser Dominika Cibulkova drove out last year's American U.S. Open darling Melanie Oudin 6-2, 5-7, 6-4 on Monday. Cibulkova is scheduled to meet two-time defending Pilot Pen champion Caroline Wozniacki in the second round.

Eighth-seeded Russian Nadia Petrova overcame American qualifier Varvara Lepchenko 1-6, 7-5, 6-1 on Day 2, while another American qualifier, Bethanie Mattek-Sands, stifled Romanian Alexandra Dulgheru 6-2, 6-1.

Additional first-round wins came for Italian Sara Errani and Ukrainian Kateryna Bondarenko. Errani will meet second-seeded French Open runner-up Samantha Stosur in the round of 16.

The Danish Wozniacki handled Russian Elena Vesnina in last year's New Haven finale to capture her second straight title here. Wozniacki, who titled in Montreal on Monday, is the top seed here.

The 2010 Pilot Pen champion will collect $98,500

The U.S. Open will commence next Monday in New York.

Kisscasnio Tennis Betting News

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.