Here's part 2 of 3 in catching up on the month of February.  At least it's a short month, right?

ATP 500 Rotterdam - ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament:

Robin Soderling beat Mikhail Youzhny 6-4, 2-0 (ret.) to take the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament in Rotterdam after Youzhny retired early in the second set with a leg injury. The title is the biggest title of Soderling's career, his first 500 level victory after previously falling short in three other 500 level finals (and a grand slam final).

Robin Soderling long had a reputation as one of the best (and only) indoor, fast-court specialists on either tour, which is what made his breakout performance at the very outdoors and slow French Open last spring so baffling to me.  By winning Rotterdam, the biggest European indoor tournament in the first half of the calendar, Soderling shows that he's still can be great at his old former strength while having added a big new strength.  A win over Davydenko along the way certainly doesn't hurt his confidence, either.

Since the title (and *SPOILER!* Andy Roddick's early exit in Memphis), Soderling has risen to a career high ranking of #7.  Not bad for someone who lost in the first round of the Australian Open to the likes of Marcel Granollers.

After the jump: ATP San Jose, ATP Costa do Sauipe, WTA Paris and WTA Pattaya City.  Click away!

ATP 250 San Jose - SAP Open:

Second-seed Fernando Verdasco knocked off top-seeded Andy Roddick 3-6, 6-4, 6-4 in the finals of San Jose in the same arena the San Jose Sharks play in, the HP Pavilion.

Verdasco didn't make it look easy along the way, having to suffer through some unnecessarily tight matches on his way to the final against decidedly inferior opponents like Yen-Hsun Lu, Ricardis Berankis, and Denis Istomin.  But the rankings don't reflect style points, just wins and losses, so he gets full marks for his run.

It's a pretty solid showing for Roddick as well, though many of his matches were also closer than he would have liked.  Of the eight sets he won on his way to the final, five of them he needed a tiebreak to win.  Impressively though, he was 5-0 in tiebreaks on the week, so maybe it wasn't such a bad strategy after all.

Aside from Roddick, it was a pretty good week on the whole for Americans, though many of the bigger American names (Isner, Fish, Blake) were not entered.   Sam Querrey made the semifinal, his first since that crazy glass table accident in Thailand, Michael Russell made the quarterfinals, and Taylor Dent made the second round.  Those days when American men's tennis seemed to be completely dead in the water seem like quite a while ago.

ATP 250 Costa do Sauipe - Brasil Open:

Juan Carlos Ferrero, the biggest name in Costa do Sauipe by miles, easily won the 2010 Brasil Open, not facing a seed at any point, and ending with a 6-1, 6-0 rout of Lukasz Kubot in the final.

Kubot's ranking unbelievably is inside the top fifty now, on the back of this run and his shock second week appearance at the Australian Open.  For a guy who broke into the top 100 for the first time in his career as recently as November, this has been an incredibly rapid ascent for the Polish doubles specialist.  I cannot remember a single other instance of a presumed doubles specialist improving this much in singles so late in his career, so good on him for defying the stereotypes.

There's not a whole lot else to say about this tournament since pretty much all of the results could be considered foregone conclusions.  But in looking for nuggets of trivia to glean, the best I can come up with is to remark at the quarterfinal matchup that took place between third-seeded Thomaz Bellucci and wild card Ricardo Mello, a matchup most notable because both players are Brazilian.  That had to be a big break for the organizers, to be sure. Brazil is a country that likes tennis a fair amount but isn't much into producing players since Gustavo Kuerten, so for them to have homegrown talent make good in their only ATP event is a nice break.

WTA Premier Paris - Open Gaz de France Suez

Elena Dementieva outlasted Lucie Safarova 6-7(5), 6-1, 6-4 in a thrilling final to win the Open GDF Suez in Paris.  It's Dementieva's second title of 2010 in only her third tournament, adding to her Sydney title with a win the Paris Indoors, a tournament in which she finished runner-up to Amelie Mauresmo in last year's final.  Her only loss (to this point) this year had been to Justine Henin in the second round of the Australian Open, which should really make you wonder how much better she could have done down under with better luck of the draw.  And her mental game, once considered as big a weakness as her serve, is clearly not a problem any more, since she managed to fight back from a set down in her final three matches of this tournament.

Through American lenses, by far the story of this tournament was Melanie Oudin, who followed up her big performance against France in a nearby Fed Cup tie the week before with a run to the semifinals of this event, her first time in the semifinals of any WTA tournament.  She didn't have an easy draw, either, knocking out Sorana Cirstea, Patty Schnyder and Agnes Szavay before falling in three sets to Dementieva.  Here's hoping she carries that momentum through Indian Wells and Miami, and into the grand slam seed territory of the rankings before she has to defend those boatloads of points at both Wimbledon and the US Open.

Through non-American lenses, the biggest shock of the tournament has to be the run to the finals by Lucie Safarova, who is always good for a shock run every once in a while.  Safarova's run through the bottom half of the draw saw her beat three seeds: Francesca Schiavone, Shahar Peer, and Flavia Pennetta, dropping only one set along the way.  Safarova made the finals of this event in 2007 as well, beating Justine Henin along the way in what was one of Henin's four losses in a season which saw her compile a ridiculous 63-4 record.

In more important news, doesn't this trophy look like a relative of the famous Metz Alien Baby? I'm thinking this is the Mothership, which has finally realized it's egg is somewhere at a tennis tournament in France. 

Keep looking, Mothership--you're on the right track.

WTA International Pattaya City - PTT Pattaya Open:

Vera Zvonareva defended her 2009 title in Pattaya City with relative ease, beating local girl Tamarine Tanasugarn in the finals of the small tournament by the score of 6-4, 6-4.

Zvonareva already lost the many ranking points by not defending her run to the semifinals of the 2009 Australian Open, but she's got an even bigger bunch of points hanging over her head soon in Indian Wells, where she is the defending champion.  But she shouldn't be nearly as nervous about her Indian Wells points as the woman she beat in the finals last year, Ana Ivanovic, should be.  Those could be two simultaneous plummets like few seen before.

Though Zvonareva and Tanasugarn walked away with the hardware here, the real story is probably the fact that Kazakhstan boasted two semifinalists in Pattaya City.  Say what you will about the questionable tactics that the Kazakh Tennis Federation has employed (which I have written about before here), but the fact that they're getting bigger and bigger on the tennis landscape at an incredible pace is undeniable.

Yaroslava Shvedova was the fourth seed in the tournament, so her run to the semifinals is hardly shocking, but the final four appearance of her new compatriot Sesil Karatantcheva is entirely shocking.  Karatantcheva really hasn't had any good results whatsoever since coming back from that positive steroid test which her camp blamed on an abortion in 2005, so for her to come out of nowhere to make the finals of even a tournament this small.