Our Jurij Rodionov vs Jakub Menšik prediction for this US Open second-rounder (2:00 PM ET) starts with a gap that looks bigger on paper than it is on court. Menšík is No. 18, a Sinner-beater this year, and the market has him at -1000. Rodionov is playing his first-ever US Open main draw off a four-match qualifying run.
T Money's read favors Menšík, but the tier on this one is PASS. No official action, and here is why.
Why Rodionov can make this a fight
Rodionov qualified with four straight wins on hard courts, capped by a 7-6(2) 6-0 7-6(4) win over Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, one of the biggest servers on tour. He hit zero double faults in that match, won 81 percent of points behind his first serve, and was never broken across three sets. That is a career-best level of serving, and it is happening right now, on the same surface as Sunday's match.
The catch is who he beat to get here. Mpetshi Perricard is a talent in decline, not a top-40 player. The other three qualifying wins came against players ranked roughly 107th and in the 150 to 200 range. Rodionov's floor is higher than his long-term hard-court record suggests, but the ceiling on that resume is still tour-fringe. He has not had to do this against someone who beat Sinner this year.
Menšík's durability question
The case against Menšík is not about his level. It is about whether his body holds up over five sets. He withdrew from this year's Australian Open, also a hard-court major, before a quarterfinal with an abdominal injury. He needed a wheelchair to leave the court after a 4-hour, 41-minute Roland Garros semifinal win, though that one came on clay and is a secondary data point on stamina rather than a hard-court form line.
His grass-court summer is the same kind of secondary evidence. He nearly lost to Mannarino, a lefty, in a three-tiebreak, 2-hour-42-minute match at Queen's, and it illustrates a real pattern (long matches and lefty serves give him trouble) without telling us much about Sunday's hard court directly. The more relevant match came in Cincinnati, also on hard, where he needed a third-set tiebreak to get past another lefty, Bellucci, in nearly three hours. His second serve has leaked all summer too: six double faults in each of his last two matches, winning as low as 43 percent of those points in one of them. Rodionov himself is a lefty who serves well from the ad court, which is exactly the shape of matchup that has given Menšík problems in 2026, even if the head-to-head data behind it comes from other surfaces.
The number that matters
None of that changes the number on the card: Menšík at -1000. T Money's execution rules cap any priced side at -170, and anything heavier is an automatic PASS, full stop, regardless of how the fundamentals read. A pick has to clear that gate before price even becomes a betting question, and -1000 is not close.
The fundamentals still point to Menšík. He beat Sinner, de Minaur, and Rublev this year, and Rodionov's best win, by comparison, came against a fringe top-100 name in decline. Best-of-five also asks Rodionov to hold his qualifying-week level across three more matches worth of tennis, not one. But this is not a played number. It's a PASS on the card, named for what it is: a side we like without a price we can back.
The verdict
PASS. T Money's fundamentals lean Menšík, and the durability and lefty-serve questions keep this from being a lock, but -1000 is well outside any price this shop plays. No official action on this one.