It has been a frustrating summer for Yuki Bhambri, who won just one match in his previous six tournament outings, partnering New Zealander Michael Venus. It wasn’t that the pair was being outplayed; they were losing close matches.Over that three-month stretch, where they played just seven matches, the duo lost five tie-breaks and two match tie-breaks.When Bhambri arrived in Almaty a week ago, with temperatures dipping below zero, he wasn’t expecting much. He was simply hoping that his right quad, injured in August at Winston-Salem, would hold up and allow him to finish the year competing.Partnering with American Ryan Seggerman this week, Bhambri did considerably better. The fourth-seeded duo won five tie-breaks and two match tie-breaks on their way to claiming the ATP 250 title at the luminous Almaty Arena on Sunday.Bhambri and Seggerman beat Austrian top seeds Lucas Miedler and Neil Oberleitner 7-6 (3), 6-7 (1), 10-2 in the final.Despite going through the year without a title, Bhambri didn’t think he was playing badly. “I deserved to win a lot more matches than I have,” he told TOI. “This week we were able to win those matches that I sort of didn’t end up winning with Michael. We were losing tie-breaks and match tie-breaks, and had we won a few of those the year would’ve looked different.”Bhambri, 34, and 6 ft 1, and Seggerman, 27, and 6 ft 4, were at their best in the shootouts this week.“Ryan has a phenomenal serve, and he served incredibly well under pressure,” Bhambri said. “We put a lot of pressure on our opponents to come with the goods. I held my own as well this week and made some returns when it mattered, in the important points.”“When you win a tournament, you have to be good in the important points, in the tie-breakers, and I think that was the difference this week.”Bhambri said he was feeling physically better than he had in previous weeks. While he isn’t entirely pain-free, he is able to compete without any great discomfort.The next stop for India’s No. 1 is an ATP Challenger in Seoul, where he will partner Taiwan’s Ray Ho. He is unsure who he will team up with at the Paris Masters in early November, but will finish the year alongside Seggerman in Stockholm.Venus, 39, and Bhambri, who reached the US Open semifinals in 2025, are long-time friends. With results proving elusive, they decided to take a breather from their partnership for the final few tournaments of the year.“We did try to get the results,” Bhambri said. “We did everything we can. We put our heads together, and tried everything we could to get this partnership going, but we just ran out of gas. So just to keep things a bit fresh, we decided that a bit of a change was good.”“We thought we could go out and play a bit more freely and not be bogged down by the results we weren’t getting,” he said.For Bhambri, the Almaty title was more than a welcome end to a frustrating run. With his body holding up and his confidence restored on the big points, it offered a timely reminder that the margins separating a lean spell from a winning one can be wafer-thin.
