The $300,000 (£249,000/€268,000) Moscow Open gets underway tomorrow with men's and women's qualifying before main draw play commences on Thursday (August 15), with medal matches on Sunday (August 18).

The 2019 Moscow Open at Luzhniki Olympic Complex will be the 14th FIVB men’s and 12th women’s tournament held in the Russian capital.

It is rated as a four-star event.

Only Gstaad, Klagenfurt, Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Stavanger and Espinho have hosted more men's and women's tournaments than Moscow since the start of FIVB-sanctioned events in 1987.

World champions Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy are the men's top seeds on home sand.

The team they beat in last month's World Championships final in Hamburg, Germany's Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler, are seeded fifth.

Sandwiched between the two pairings are second-seeded Brazilians Evandro Gonçalves Oliveira Júnior and Bruno Oscar Schmidt, third-seeded compatriots Andre Loyola Stein and George Souto Maior Wanderley, and fourth-seeded Italians Paolo Nicolai and Daniele Lupo.

Defending champions Jānis Šmēdiņš and Aleksandrs Samoilovs are seeded 17th.

Three Brazilian partnerships lead the women's event seeding, with Ana Patricia Silva Ramos and Rebecca Cavalcanti Barbosa Silva first, Agatha Bednarczuk and Eduarda Santos Lisboa second, and Maria Antonelli and Carolina Solberg Salgado third.