The best thing about being a player on the WTA Tour is traveling the world, meeting new people, and playing matches in front of crowds of different nationalities.

That is the opinion of 23-year-old Bulgarian player Tsvetana Pironkova, the worst thing is being away from her family and friends for so long. She also misses her dog Muro and her cats Bary and Butch.

The player she least likes playing is Agnieszka Radwanska as the Polish player leads her 5-1 in their singles matches but if she could choose any player past or present to play it would be Steffi Graf as she thinks she is the greatest player ever.

Pironkova comes from a family of champions, her father Kiril is a former canoeing Champion and her mother Radosveta was a swimming champion.

Born on 13th September 1987 in Plodiv, Bulgaria where she still lives she started playing tennis at the age of 4-years old when her father introduced her to the game and at the age of 6 she started playing junior tournaments in Bulgaria.

Her father later became her coach and in 2001 at the age of 13, she won the Atlantic Cup International Junior Tournament held in Bulgaria. The following year she played her first professional tournament, a $10,000 ITF event in Bucharest winning three rounds of qualifying before going on to reach the final in the main draw which she lost to Romanian player Monica Niculescu.

In 2003 she won 3 ITF singles titles, one in Orestiada, Greece, and 2 in Istanbul. She first came to prominence in 2006 when she beat Venus Williams in the 1st round of the Australian Open and by the end of the year, her ranking was 62 in the world.

In 2008 she caused another upset at the Rome Masters when she came from qualifying into the main draw and knocked out the top seed and World number 3 Ana Ivanovic. She reached the quarter-final before being beaten by Anna Chakvetadze.

The biggest upset of her career was at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships when she knocked out 5-times Champion Venus Williams in the quarter-finals.

She says she has not got time for a boyfriend as she is too busy working on her tennis, but the first thing she notices about a man is the way he looks, then she goes for personality, sense of humor, and whether he is good company.

In 2011 she beat French player Pauline Parmentier in the first round of the Australian Open but for the 4th consecutive year, she failed to get through the next round.

Tsvetana Pironkova has been selected for the Bulgarian team for the 2011 Federation Cup. Also in the team is the mother of two Magdalena Maleeva who retired from the tour in 2005.