Sloppy Tomic loses in Stuttgart

Australian teenager and third seed Bernard Tomic suffered a shock straight-sets defeat to the Brazilian Thomaz Bellucci in the second round of the Mercedes Cup in Stuttgart.

Betfair Tennis punters had backed Tomic, who reached the quarter-finals at Wimbledon last year and the fourth round of the Australian Open six months ago, to progress to the next round. But they didn’t account for a slick display from clay court specialist Bellucci, whose 7-6 6-3 win, sets up a quarter-final clash with German Cedrik-Marcel Stebe.

The German veteran and number eight seed Tommy Haas was also surprisingly knocked out by the Slovak qualifier Pavol Cervenak and world number 206 6-4 6-4.

"It's been a bad day for me," admitted Haas afterwards. "I wasn't striking the ball well and missed a lot of crucial points."

Only last month, Haas defeated Roger Federer to win the Halle grasscourt tournament.

In the quarter-finals Cervenak will play the Argentine second seed Juan Monaco, who thrashed Germany's Tobias Kamke 6-2 6-3 and is the new favourite on Betfair  at time of writing.

Monaco is enjoying the best season of his career and has already won two tournaments this year - in Vina del Mar and Houston - clinching 24 victories in his 33 matches in 2012.

Third seed Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia, who has won his way through to the quarter-finals of a tournament for a seventh time this year, comes up against the 32-year-old German Bjorn Phau.

Tipsarevic is currently ranked eighth in the world but is the only top-ten player not to have won a tournament so far in 2012, although he was the beaten finalist in Chennai in January.

In the final last-eight clash the German wildcard Dustin Brown takes on the Spaniard Guillermo Garcia-Lopez.