The biggest surprise of the 2021 Australian Open, has to be the Russian Aslan Karatsev. Many people predicted that this year the AO will offer some surprises, but I bet no one thought a qualifier would make it to the Top 4 at his first main draw grand slam appearance.

In true Impacting Tennis fashion, we’ll take a look how his racket helped him on this journey, by dissecting his racket specs and setup. A knowledgable source on talk tennis forums already provided his specs. Based on his game style and stroke mechanics, I suspect that the specs are correct. Take a look at what he uses in the picture below.

What stands out is his very low MGR/I, low mass, headlight balance and relatively high swing weight for this static mass range. This indicates a very polarized setup, which can be achieved with a light pro stock hairpin of the PT57A, by weighting it up with, for example, just silicon in the handle and weight under the bumper. Aslan compensates for the low static weight and headlight balance, by playing with very straight arms on the forehand backhand side. Effectively this means he creates a pendulum with longer levers away from his body and increases the effective swingweight. He can still generate a lot of racket head speed and use a very whippy technique on the serve and the forehand. The downside of this kind of setup is, that it makes him a bit one dimensional and I don’t think he has a great plan B (because of the racket), when just ripping topspin on both sides doesn’t work. So far, what is working for him at the AO 2021, are the faster courts this year and the fact that none of his opponents so far knew how to exploit this weakness. But Djokovic, who awaits him in the semi-finals, excels at this, by keeping the one dimensional players behind the baseline, where it’s very hard to hurt him with just solid ground strokes. Anyway, it’s going to be an interesting semi-final match, just for the fact, that we have a new face at the later stages of a grand slam, who also brings an interesting game style.