The first day of the China Championship includes three sessions of play out in the Asian nation on Monday as the held over qualifying matches of the competition are all played as well as the beginning of the first round.
Sometimes you have to wait until later into the tournament to see the star names come to the party but that isn’t the case here, with Ding Junhui, Judd Trump, Mark Williams and Mark Selby all on a decent Monday card.
Early Morning Session
The first session of the tournament sees four held over matches played out as well as four first round games. The two TV matches come from the held over games with Mark Selby taking on Chen Feilong on one of them for a place in the main draw while Yan Bingtao goes up against fellow Chinese player Mei Xiwen on the other main table for the right to take on Sam Baird in the first round of the main draw.
There are a couple of matches in the wildcard part of the event where the two winners will go into the held over qualifying round. They see Wu Yize playing Pang Junxu and Li Yingdong meeting Zhao Jianbo with the winners returning later in the day for their next match. The four first round matches sees Martin Gould playing Scott Donaldson, Alexander Ursenbacher going up against Chris Wakelin, Barry Hawkins gets his campaign up and running against Liam Highfield and Li Hang meets Sam Craigie.
Morning Session
There is just the one held over match in this set of games on Monday and it sees the world champion Judd Trump in action. He is obviously on one of the two main tables as he takes on James Wattana. The other seven matches in this session are all from the first round of the main draw. John Higgins has the TV table treatment as he goes up against Andrew Higginson and a match which might confuse the commentators a little bit!
Lu Haotian is on one of the outside tables in this session. He faces the English player Mitchell Mann while Jordan Brown will look to build on his win over Stuart Bingham to qualify when he meets Sunny Akani while Graeme Dott takes on Kurt Maflin in one of the better looking games in the session. Joe O’Connor faces Ryan Day in another of those and Ben Woollaston takes on Matt Selt. The other match in this morning session sees Matthew Stevens facing Dominic Dale.
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Afternoon Session
We have a mixture of the held over matches and the first round games in the last of the three sessions on the day. Ding Junhui is in one of the held over games and he’ll be on the TV table when he goes up against the largely unknown Brandon Sargeant while the other TV game sees the former world champion Mark Williams going up against his fellow Welsh player in Kishan Hirani.
Tom Ford plays his held over match on the outside tables. He plays the winner of Wu Yize or Pang Junxu from earlier in the day while in the first round the winner of the Yan Bingtao and Mei Xiwen match will meet Sam Baird, Martin O’Donnell takes on Xiao Guodong, Jak Jones plays Mark Joyce in a tough looking match and Noppon Saengkham plays Mark King in a contest where both will probably feel they have had a rough draw.
Betting
I’ll go with a couple of bets on Monday with the first of them in the morning session when a man I’ve been keen on for the better part of the whole of 2019, Joe O’Connor, goes up against Ryan Day who hasn’t really been himself at all this year. Even this season he’s had some strange results. He’s lost to Kurt Maflin and Louis Heathcote and only beaten Duane Jones and Jamie Clarke in deciding frames. That doesn’t bode well to me so I’m happy to take the misfiring Welshman on. O’Connor has already seen off Michael White and Peter Ebdon in the various tournaments this season and he’s good enough to add Day to his list of victims.
Martin O’Donnell qualified for this tournament but he had a plum draw to do so and the way the rest of his season has panned out he might well have needed that. O’Donnell beat Steve Mifsud to qualify for this tournament but he only did that 5-3. Prior to that he lost 4-1 to Lu Ning and 6-1 to Ashley Carty in qualifying for Riga and the International. I’m not sure he is going to fare much better against a Xiao Guodong who has had some decent results this term. It has taken Ding and Kyren Wilson to beat him in the last two tournaments but he had a great win over Stephen Maguire in Shanghai along the way. The home star should be way too good for O’Donnell here.
Tips
Back J.O’Connor to beat R.Day for a 3/10 stake at 2.75 with William Hill
Back him here:
Back X.Guodong (-1.5 frames) to beat M.O’Donnell for a 4/10 stake at 2.10 with Coral
Back him here:
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