The women’s pool-play matches have concluded at the 2017 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships, which means that the first 28 teams have clinched their spots in the 32-team single-elimination bracket. Each team that finished 1st or 2nd in their group, plus the four-best 3rd place teams, have automatically advanced and will be re-seeded. The other 8 teams that finished 3rd in their pools must go to the Lucky Losers bracket, where they play a winner-takes-all against other Lucky Losers, with the winners advancing to the 32-team bracket and the losers eliminated.
The 8 teams playing in the Lucky Losers bracket:
#28 Glenzke/Grossner (Germany) vs. #30 Filippo/Erika (Paraguay)
#36 Birlova/Makroguzova (Russia) vs. #26 Lidy/Leila (Cuba)
#34 Zonta/Gallay (Argentina) vs. #33 Pischke/Broder (Canada)
#18 Yue/Wang (China) vs. #24 Bieneck/Schneider (Germany)
The biggest match to watch in Tuesday afternoon’s Lucky Losers is the showdown between Yue/Wang and Bieneck/Schneider. Both teams were seeded to finish in the top two of their bracket (though for Bieneck/Schneider, that was under unusual circumstances thanks to the new Walsh-Jennings/Branagh pairing, subsequent Walsh-Jennings injury, and now Day/Branagh pairing). One of those two teams will end their tournament on Tuesday – which would be surprising for either. Yue/Wang have played well this season, including finishing 2nd in the Xiamen 3-star to open their season, where Bieneck/Schneider placed 3rd. The former ran into a fast-rising, under-seeded pair of Flier/van Iersel, while the latters appeared to lack conditioning in their play.
The 3rd-place teams that advance automatically:
#3 Agatha/Duda (Brazil)
#20 Davidova/Shchypkova (Ukraine)
#8 Barbara/Fernanda (Brazil)
#38 Xue/Wang X.X. (China)
Two top-10 seeds dodged big bullets here. Brazil’s Agatha/Duda took a single loss on Tuesday, but after tie-breakers that was enough to send them to 3rd in Pool C. They had won enough matches, though, to be among the top 3rd-place teams (most of the 3rd-place finishers had only 1 win). Their Brazilian counterparts were among the one-win 3rd-place finishers, thanks in part to losing to their countrymates Maia/Lima to open the tournament.
Davidova/Shchypkova of Ukraine were the other 3rd-place finishers with 2 wins who automatically advanced. They upset group winners Summer/Sweat in their final match on Tuesday morning to avoid having to play a double-header to advance.
Teams play each other team in their pool once. The top two teams in each of the 12 pools automatically advance to the round of 32 elimination stage. The four best 3rd-place teams (as determined by the heirarchy below) also get a free pass to the round of 32. The other eight 3rd-place teams play in “lucky losers” matches, with the winners earning spots in the 32-team bracket.
Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of VolleyMob.com.
Braden's first foray into sports journalism came in 2010, when he launched a swimming website called The Swimmers' Circle. Two years later, he joined SwimSwam.com as a co-founder.
Long huge fans of volleyball, when Braden and the SwimSwam partners sought an opportunity to …
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