It is the second day of qualifying in the Riga Masters on Thursday with another set of players looking to land the win which will take them to the final stages of the tournament in the Latvian capital later in the month.
Once again we have three sessions of play and some of the bigger names involved in the tournament are on show on what should be a day of good quality inside the Guild Hall in Preston.
Morning Session
After a couple of withdrawals we are left with four matches in the morning session with the main match very much being the one between Stephen Maguire and Ian Burns. That is on one of the streamed tables with Oliver Lines taking on Yuan Sijun on the other.
Away from the cameras we have two more matches in the session as Sean O’Sullivan goes up against Christopher Keogan in a match both have the chance to earn well from with Gerard Greene and Zhang Yong meeting in the other.
Afternoon Session
Arguably the match of the qualifying section takes place in the first half of the afternoon session when Graeme Dott meets Joe Perry on a streamed table. Anthony Hamilton takes on Hossein Vafaei in a tasty clash on the other. Zhou Yuelong begins his season away from the spotlight against Kurt Dunham and Tian Pengfei meets Scott Donaldson in the other matches.
In the second part of the afternoon we have Robert Milkins in front of the cameras when he plays Aditya Mehta. Michael Holt faces off with Barry Hawkins on the other live table. Mike Dunn begins married life with a match against Ben Jones while Wang Yuchen plays Rod Lawler and Craig Steadman faces Lu Haotian.
Evening Session
The all-Welsh clash between Ryan Day and David John gets centre billing in this session as does the match between Alfie Burden and the World Championship quarter finalist Kyren Wilson. Elsewhere we have Mitchell Mann playing Ben Woollaston, Chen Zifan meeting Ross Muir and Mark Joyce facing Fang Xiongman.
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Betting
After an awful, if a shade unlucky, opening day I’m going with just the one bet to try and begin the repair job on Thursday and it comes in the form of Scott Donaldson who really impressed me last season and who I’m confident will kick on again this season.
Donaldson meets Tian Pengfei who hasn’t kicked on as I expected in recent times. We saw Donaldson’s prowess over this format last season when he made it to the Welsh Open semi-final last season. He made it to the last 16 of the Northern Ireland Open in this format too so he enjoys best of seven combat and can do so even more with a win here.
Tips
Back S.Donaldson to beat T.Pengfei for a 4/10 stake at 1.89 with Unibet
Back him here:
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