The return of Seven’s success story of last year My Kitchen Rules firmly dominated rival MasterChef The Professionals, getting nearly 500,000 more viewers in the 7.30pm slot.

Heavily promoted throughout the well-watched Australian Open coverage Seven’s reality cooking format got 1.384m viewers, although this was well down on regular audiences last year.

MasterChef pulled in just 892,000, coming tenth overall, with Nine’s rain affected coverage of the Twenty/20 match up of Australia v Sri Lanka fourth with 1.384m viewers.

Both shows also beat Ten’s flagship into third place in the key 18-49 and 16-39 demographics.

However, rolling coverage of the flooding disaster in Queensland saw Nine News on top according to the OzTam preliminary results, with 1.57m, with Seven News second with 1.534m, although Seven edged the affected Brisbane market.