Gabriel Tardio and Noe Khlif stood one point from a 10-0 pickle before recovering in Kuala Lumpur. They survived, but Thursday showed that PPA Tour Asia’s leading names may have considerably less room for comfort than the seedings suggest.
Key takeaways
- Top men’s doubles seeds Gabriel Tardio and Noe Khlif recovered from 10-0 down in the opening game to beat Pengsu Yong and Syed Uzair Sufi 3-11, 11-5, 11-1.
- Nok Yiu Tang and Yufei Long produced Thursday’s biggest seeded upset by beating No.4 women’s doubles seeds Kaitlyn Christian and Allyce Jones 12-10, 12-10.
- Malaysia’s Jimmy Liong Kai Long reached the men’s singles round of 16 and now faces 15-year-old Tama Shimabukuro.
- Friday’s men’s doubles quarter-finals include Tardio/Khlif against Luc Pham/George Wall and Augustus Ge/Len Yang against AJ Koller/Quan Do.
- The early evidence from Kuala Lumpur suggests the favourites remain strong, but increasingly unfamiliar and accomplished opposition is making the route through PPA Tour Asia less predictable.
Gabriel Tardio and Noe Khlif came to Kuala Lumpur as the partnership everyone else was supposed to worry about.
Ten points into their PPA Tour Asia debut, the worrying was entirely theirs.
The top seeds in men’s doubles were 10-0 down against Pengsu Yong and Malaysia’s Syed Uzair Sufi. One more point and Tardio, ranked No.2 in the World Pickleball Rankings, and Khlif would have begun one of the most anticipated appearances of the Asian season by being pickled.
They avoided that. They could not avoid losing the game.
Yong and Sufi eventually closed it 11-3, leaving the favourites one game from elimination before their tournament had properly started. Only then did the expected order return. Tardio and Khlif took the second 11-5 and overwhelmed their opponents 11-1 in the decider.
From 0-10 to a place in Friday’s quarter-finals.
The comeback was impressive. The fact that they needed one was more revealing.
Thursday at the Leapmotor Kuala Lumpur Cup was supposed to begin separating a deep field from its genuine title contenders. Instead, it offered a series of reminders that the names at the top of this draw will not necessarily dictate what happens beneath them.
WPM explored the bigger significance of this tournament earlier in the week, when we looked at why leading players such as Tardio are increasingly building PPA Tour Asia into their schedules.
Now the tournament itself has begun answering a different question.
How comfortable will those stars actually be once they arrive?
The first big seed is already gone
Kaitlyn Christian and Allyce Jones did not get Tardio and Khlif’s second chance.
The fourth seeds in women’s doubles were beaten 12-10, 12-10 by Hong Kong’s Nok Yiu Tang and China’s Yufei Long.
Straight games, technically. Nothing straightforward about them.
Both went beyond 11. Both were decided by the minimum two-point margin. Both went to Tang and Long.
For Christian in particular, the result carried some weight. She returns to Malaysia as the reigning Panas Malaysia Cup women’s singles champion and is the top seed in that discipline this week. Jones, meanwhile, brings considerable experience from the highest level of the American professional game.
Yet by Thursday evening their doubles tournament was finished.
It would be too much to turn one result into a sweeping statement about the balance of international pickleball. What it does show is something more useful: the strongest visitors in Kuala Lumpur cannot assume unfamiliar opponents will behave like ceremonial early-round obstacles.
Tang gets the chance to reinforce that point almost immediately.
On Friday she faces Christian again, this time across a singles court, less than 24 hours after helping remove her from the doubles draw.
No manufactured rivalry is required. Tang has already altered Christian’s weekend once. Christian now gets the opportunity to answer without Jones beside her.
Malaysia still has a player in the fight
The home crowd has Jimmy Liong Kai Long.
Liong won Thursday’s all-Malaysian men’s singles contest against Er Yang Khoo 11-2, 11-9, carrying local interest into the round of 16.
His reward is one of the most interesting tests on Friday’s schedule.
Across the net will be Tama Shimabukuro, the 15-year-old third seed who has already begun building a significant Asian résumé. Shimabukuro won men’s singles gold at the Macao Open in May and reached the semi-finals of last month’s Skechers Shenzhen Open.
Liong, listed at world No.97 in the tournament media notes, has earned his way into the last 16 on home soil.
Now he gets a considerably clearer measurement of where he stands.
That is part of what makes tournaments such as Kuala Lumpur useful. The result matters, but so does the opportunity to place players whose reputations have been built in different competitive environments onto the same court and remove the theory.
Friday gives Liong exactly that.
Qualifying was only the beginning
George Patrick Mendoza arrived in the main draw having already done something difficult.
The Filipino came through qualifying in both men’s singles and men’s doubles, continuing the form that had previously carried him into the quarter-finals at the Leapmotor Singapore Open.
He qualified for doubles alongside Christopher Encarnacion.
Thursday showed how quickly the standard changes.
Australia’s Harrison Brown ended Mendoza’s singles campaign, while eighth seeds Luc Pham and George Wall removed Mendoza and Encarnacion from the doubles draw.
The Brazilian qualifiers Hugo Dojas and Caio Silva found the same ceiling.
Their first game against AJ Koller and Quan Do suggested an upset might be possible. Dojas and Silva pushed the established pair beyond regulation before losing 13-11.
The second game looked very different.
Koller and Do won it 11-3 and moved on.
There is a temptation at events with a significant international field to treat qualifying stories as proof that competitive gaps are disappearing. Kuala Lumpur offered a more useful picture.
Players can reach the main draw, trouble decorated opponents and still discover that sustaining that level across an entire match is another problem altogether.
The early rounds are becoming more awkward.
That does not make the hierarchy meaningless.
Friday gives us a heavyweight quarter-final
Most of the leading men’s doubles partnerships did ultimately survive Thursday.
Second seeds Augustus Ge and Len Yang progressed in straight games. Fourth seeds Eunggwon Kim and Hong Kit Wong did the same.
Now the bracket begins forcing serious contenders into one another.
Tardio and Khlif meet eighth seeds Pham and Wall in the quarter-finals. The top seeds remain favourites, but after Thursday there is a difference between knowing they can recover from trouble and assuming they will never find themselves in it.
Tardio also has more than one trophy at stake. He is the top seed in both men’s doubles and mixed doubles, where he partners Jessie Irvine.
The more intriguing men’s doubles quarter-final, though, may sit elsewhere.
Ge and Yang face Koller and Do.
This one comes with history.
Yang has won the last two men’s doubles gold medals on PPA Tour Asia, at the Skechers Shenzhen Open and the Leapmotor Singapore Open.
Koller won men’s doubles gold at the MB Vietnam Open in 2025. Do has won at the Vibrant Linping Hangzhou Open, Capital Securities Beijing Open and MB Ho Chi Minh City Open.
These are not players arriving in Asia with reputations that need to be translated.
They have already won here.
That changes the nature of Friday’s match. It is not simply an imported star against a regional unknown. It is a quarter-final between players with their own claims to status within the Asian tour.
For Yang in particular, there is a streak to defend. A third consecutive men’s doubles title would begin to turn an excellent run into something more substantial.
Kim and Wong have a different problem.
The Korean-Hong Kong partnership has spent the season threatening to win without quite getting there. They face Clayton Powell and India’s Aryaan Bhatia on Friday, another opportunity to convert a collection of near misses into a first men’s doubles title together.
Khlif has another test waiting
Khlif will not have much time to dwell on Thursday’s escape.
He turns to singles on Friday, where Filipino qualifier Jose Maria Pague waits in the round of 16.
Khlif carries the bigger international reputation and arrives in Asia after becoming an MLP champion. Pague carries something potentially awkward: he has already played his way through qualifying and enters with considerably less expectation.
After what happened in doubles, Khlif has already received a useful introduction to the dangers of unfamiliar opposition.
Seedings tell players where they begin.
They do not tell them how an opponent they have rarely, if ever, faced will construct a match.
That is one of the more compelling elements of Kuala Lumpur. A field this international creates matches without much shared history. Players have to learn while the scoreboard is moving.
Sometimes, as Tardio and Khlif discovered, the lesson begins at 0-10.
The women’s singles draw has its own reference point
Christian remains the top seed in women’s singles despite her doubles exit, but the opposite half contains another player with a strong claim to being measured against the tournament’s visitors.
Chao Yi Wang enters as the third seed after winning the women’s singles title at last month’s Skechers Shenzhen Open.
That matters because PPA Tour Asia now possesses something it could not manufacture overnight: recent form that belongs to the tour itself.
Shimabukuro’s Macao title matters.
Yang’s consecutive doubles titles matter.
Do’s victories matter.
Wang’s Shenzhen title matters.
Those results create a competitive history against which newcomers can actually be judged.
Kuala Lumpur does not need every Asian player to beat every visiting star to prove anything. What it needs is enough depth for those meetings to carry uncertainty.
Thursday supplied some.
Friday will tell us how much.
The easy part is over
The seedings largely survived the first full day.
That should not be forgotten amid the upsets and near-upsets.
Tardio and Khlif recovered. Ge and Yang advanced. Kim and Wong advanced. Koller and Do absorbed an awkward opening game and moved through.
The hierarchy has bent more than it has broken.
But Christian and Jones are gone.
Tardio and Khlif stood one point from a pickle.
Qualifiers made established winners work.
And Malaysia still has Liong walking onto court on Friday with a place in the quarter-finals available if he can beat one of the brightest young singles players in the draw.
Thursday therefore changed the question in Kuala Lumpur.
Before the tournament, much of the attraction came from seeing what happened when another collection of significant international names entered an increasingly established Asian circuit.
Now we know they can be troubled.
The question is whether anyone can do it for long enough to send them home.
Tardio and Khlif escaped once.
From the quarter-finals onwards, the cost of needing another escape becomes considerably higher.
Further reading
- From Cary to Kuala Lumpur: Why PPA Tour Asia Is Becoming Part of the Elite Pickleball Calendar
- Kuala Lumpur Open Shows PPA Asia Is Becoming a Player Market, Not Just a Tour
- Cary Spent a Week Breaking the Script. On Sunday, the Champions Took It Back
- MLP Asia Domestic Draft Builds Six Teams Around Local Talent
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…
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