Ho Tam reaches two finals as Macao Open delivers drama

Ho Tam did not just survive semifinal Saturday in Macao. She turned the Macao Open into a proof point for Vietnam’s rise, reaching two Championship Sunday finals and showing that Asia’s bracket is no longer being owned by the same old names.

The unseeded Vietnamese player beat Anni Xie 11-6, 11-6 in women’s singles, then teamed with Mihae Kwon to outlast Rika Fujiwara and Kei Sawaki 8-11, 11-2, 11-8 in women’s doubles. That was the clean finish, but the run was built the hard way: three games over Tya Karina in the round of 16, three more to upset fourth seed Sophia Phuong Anh Tran in the quarterfinals, then another composed performance against Xie. Tam had no PPA Tour Asia medals before Macao. She was leaving with at least two, with the color still to be decided on Championship Sunday.

Fujiwara’s path said just as much about the state of the region. She had already beaten top seed Yufei Long 11-7, 11-4 to set up her first final against Tam, and her résumé explains why that matters. PPA Tour Asia identified Fujiwara as a former top-level tennis professional and a 2002 French Open doubles semifinalist. The WTA lists her career-high doubles ranking at No. 13, while the ITF lists her as 44 years old and right-handed. That kind of pedigree meeting an unseeded Vietnamese breakthrough is exactly the sort of collision Macao is starting to produce.

The same was true on the men’s side, where 15-year-old Tama Shimabukuro kept his week alive in two events even after the mixed doubles semifinal ended with a 11-5, 11-6 loss to Nok Yiu Tang and Eunggwon Kim. Shimabukuro entered Macao as the No. 2 seed in men’s singles, No. 1 in men’s doubles with Armaan Bhatia, and No. 3 in mixed doubles with Jamie Haas, and he backed that ranking with results: a 11-4, 11-4 singles win over Matthew Finnerty and a 12-10, 9-11, 11-8 doubles escape against Kim and Hong Kit Wong. His mixed-doubles run ended, but his Macao trip still had two live medal chances.

That is the real story in Macao, China. This was a 500-point event with US$70,000 in prize money, and the stakes were high enough to pull together former tennis players, rising Vietnamese contenders, Japanese veterans and aggressive new pairings in the same draw. PPA Tour Asia says it is building the premier professional and amateur pickleball tour in Asia, and its 2026 calendar stretches across ten stops in seven markets before finishing at the Hong Kong Slam, billed as the biggest professional pickleball tournament ever staged in Asia with up to US$1.1 million on the line. Macao looked less like a standalone event than an early warning: Vietnam’s pipeline is real, the rankings are loosening, and Championship Sunday could mark a shift in who gets to define the region’s pecking order.