Marion's Happy Returns

Marion Bartoli won her fifth and biggest career title here a year ago and got off to a winning start at the Premier stop again, beating Ashley Harkleroad in straight sets on a sunny Monday afternoon. Bartoli, who beat Venus Williams in the final last year and is the No.4 seed this year, came out on fire against Harkleroad, taking the first set in 27 minutes; she went down a break early in the second set but won anyway, 61 64.

Bartoli's Stanford title from last year is the biggest of her career so far, but she has spoken about some loftier goals here this year: "I'm really happy about my season so far and I'm hoping to continue like that," she said. "I'm desperate to be back in the final of a Grand Slam. That's my main goal. My second goal is to have a one digit ranking, but that will come with my results."

Other seeds advancing in the day session were No.6 seed Shahar Peer, who rebounded after a first set blowout to beat Daniela Hantuchova, 06 64 63; No.7 seed Yanina Wickmayer, who beat Chan Yung-Jan, 63 61; and No.8 seed Victoria Azarenka, who blew past Ayumi Morita in 53 minutes, 60 62.

In the feature night match, Maria Sharapova got some revenge for a loss to Zheng Jie earlier in the year, beating the Chinese in a tight two-setter, 64 75. Sharapova, who had lost the pair's last meeting at Indian Wells, squandered a match point serving for the match at 64 54, but closed it out shortly afterwards.

"Our match at Indian Wells was a really scratchy match. I wasn't playing very well there," Sharapova said. "Today I served really well but returned quite poorly. I returned well when I had to, but I'll work on that going forward. Improving with every match is really the goal, and working myself towards the Open."

In the last match of the night, American No.3 Melanie Oudin took on Canadian No.1 Aleksandra Wozniak, a champion here in 2008.

Maria Kirilenko and qualifiers Olga Savchuk and Christina McHale also won.

In the upset of the day, the doubles No.1 seeds, Lisa Raymond and Rennae Stubbs, squandered a match point and lost to Sarah Borwell and Raquel Kops-Jones, 60 46 1210. The match point came at 9-8 in the match tie-break.

"We deserved that," Borwell said. "It's a huge hurdle we have been working hard to get over for the last seven months and we finally managed it. I could cry with relief because we just kept working hard and hoping our time would come."