Baldwin Chan fights through hand injury to reach WTT US Smash main draw

Baldwin Chan turned a hand injury into a main-draw pass, grinding out a 3-0 win over Huang Youzheng and surviving the kind of pressure that has already thinned the men’s qualifying field at the WTT US Smash. The Hong Kong player had to squeeze through every opening, with the set scores 17-15, 11-8 and 13-11 showing how narrow the margin was even in a straight-games result.

The match came at the Ontario Convention Center in Ontario, California, where the US Smash is running from June 26 to July 5 with USD 1,550,000 in prize money. Chan’s progress matters because the event sits near the top of WTT’s calendar, and qualifying has been anything but routine. The bracket has been producing long fights across the board, with Xue Fei beating Ricardo Walther 3-2, Martin Allegro edging Park Gyuhyeon 3-2, Vladislav Ursu getting past Ovidiu Ionescu 3-2 and Deni Kozul topping Mehdi Bouloussa 3-1.

Chan’s win was made sharper by what was happening courtside. Hong Kong coach Liu Guodong was actively talking him through the match, adjusting tactics between games and timeouts as Chan managed the injury and the scoreline. Liu’s presence carried extra weight too, given his track record guiding Singapore to major success before taking on Hong Kong talent. In a qualifier this tight, that kind of calm, in-match steering can be the difference between going home early and getting into the main draw.

The official WTT results page listed Chan’s men’s singles qualifying-round 2 match against Huang Youzheng, and it also shows Chan later defeating Eugene Wang in another qualifying match, 3-1. That backed up the larger picture from the draw: Chan did not just scrape through one high-stress meeting, he kept surviving as the men’s side filled up with players such as Lim Jonghoon, Feng Yi-Hsin, Andre Bertelsmeier and Marcos Freitas.

That is the real shape of this US Smash so far. Chan’s hand injury would normally be a built-in handicap, but the draw has been brutal enough that even compromised players still have a path if they can win the big points. The main draw will bring the seeded names, but the qualifier has already done plenty of damage, and Chan has been one of the players who refused to break first.