later in the set, and keeping his lead to a 7–5, 6–3 victory, in little less than two hours. In the second Gold Group match of the day, Nikolay Davydenko faced recent Paris Masters champion Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, in their second career meeting. Both players held their serve in the first set, to a tie-break the Russian eventually lost 6–8, on an unforced error, and the second set was just as tight, until Davydenko made one break at 5–4, levelling the match to one-set-all. The Russian broke early in the final set, and was serving for the match at 5–2, when Tsonga started a comeback, taking the match to a crucial tie-break. Davydenko then proved too solid for Tsonga, repeating his own performance from their only previous meeting, in Moscow, where he had won 7–0 in a first set tie break, and scored again a perfect tie-break in Shanghai to win the match 6–7, 6–4, 7–6 after more than two hours and a half of play. Day 2 In the doubles event, on November 10, second-seeded Daniel Nestor and Nenad Zimonjić faced Erlich and Ram's replacements Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski in the first doubles match of the day. The Canadian-Serbian pair edged a close win over the Poles to improve their head-to-head against them to 3–2 (2–2 in 2008). Nestor and Zimonjić faced strong competition in the first set, snatching a 7–4 victory in the tie-break, before Fyrstenberg and Matkowski levelled the score to one-set-all winning the second set 7–5, forcing the encounter into a match tie-break, in which Nestor and Zimonjić proved stronger, eventually claiming a 7–6, 5–7, [10–4] victory, in little less than two hours. The second match of the day, a first career meeting between Jonas Björkman, in his last appearance on the tour –his seventh at the year-end event, having won in 1994 and 2006– and Kevin Ullyett, and Lukáš Dlouhý and Leander Paes, turned out an easier task for the veteran Björkman and partner Ullyett, as they lost merely ten points on their serve, and converted all their break opportunities, to win 6–3, 7–5, in just more than one hour. The first of the two singles matches, both from the Red Group, saw Nadal's replacement Gilles Simon take on top seed Roger Federer, to record his second straight win against the Swiss in two career meetings. Federer took the first opportunity, breaking the Frenchman to