Third seeds Leander Paes and Lukas Dlouhy made a shock first round exit from USD 2,233,500 Dubai Tennis championships after losing 4-6 6-2 8-10 to unseeded pair of Simone Bolelli and Ivo Karlovic.
Paes-Dlouhy made a spirited comeback after going down in the first set but lost it in the closely fought super tie-breaker.
They squandered three breakpoints in the first set to hand the lead to their Italian-Croatian rivals but pulled up their socks and outplayed them in the second to draw parity.
However,Bolelli and big serving Karlovic edged past their fancied rivals in the deciding tie-breaker to book a quarterfinal berth for themselves.
Mahesh Bhupathi and Prakash Amritraj are also in the fray with their respective partners. Bhupathi and Mark Knowles of Bahama,seeded second,will play their opener against UAE8217;s wild card entrants Hamoud Abbas and Mahmoud-Naden Al Baloushi.
Amritraj and his Pakistani partner Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi have been given a wild card entry and they will begin their campaign against Czech Martin Damm and Robert Lindstedt of Sweden.