We have moved into April now which means that all eyes are beginning to lean towards the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield for the World Championship. 16 players have already secured their place at the iconic venue and the other 16 spots will be filled in the qualifying tournament, which gets underway on Monday.
There are plenty of household names looking to make it back to the Crucible over the nine days of action, not least World Championship icons Stephen Hendry and Jimmy White who meet in a legendary battle in the first round of qualifying. With spots at the Crucible at stage as well as tour survival this event never fails to deliver.
The Format
It is a 128 player event but this competition should be thought of as 16 eight player groups with each group winner progressing to take their place in the main draw. The first round sees those ranked 81-128 in the world and the 16 invited players battling it out. The 32 winners then progress to take on players ranked 49-80. Those winners go through to meet someone ranked 17-48 in the third round and the 32 winners from that round meet in the final round with the winners going into the main draw. The first three rounds of the tournament are the best of 11 frames with the final round the traditional best of 19.
Group 1
Chinese sensation Zhou Yuelong is the leading seed in the draw and he will be expected to finish a decent season by qualifying through to the Crucible. The other top seed in this group is Elliot Slessor. There are six lower ranked players in this section with Xu Si and Liam Highfield the two men who get to bypass the opening round. This group really is all about the two legends though with Stephen Hendry and Jimmy White being in this part of the draw. Zak Surety and Fan Zhengyi are the other men looking to steal some of the spotlight.
Group 2
The Gibraltar Open semi-finalist and the man who beat Stephen Hendry on his comeback last month, Matt Selt, is the top seed in Group 2. The other high ranked player who will come in during round three is Scott Donaldson but this is a loaded section of the draw with a number of classy veterans who’ve had good Crucible runs. Nigel Bond is one of those and he, along with Dominic Dale, skip the first round of qualifying. Ken Doherty heads up the other four players who also include Lee Walker, Oliver Lines and Dylan Emery.
Group 3
One of the qualifiers who performed so well last year is the top seed in Group 3 this season in the Norwegian number one Kurt Maflin. The getting back to form Rob Milkins is the other leading seed in this part of the draw. Joe O’Connor and Jak Jones have both had positive seasons and get to skip the first round in this ground. That will be attended by Fraser Patrick, Leo Fernandez, Barry Pinches and Jamie Wilson so this is one of the more open groups among the early sections.
Group 4
Tom Ford has been knocking on the door of major finals and big results this season but it might be that qualifying for Sheffield will be the biggest of them all. If he is to make it there then if this group goes with the seedings he will have to overcome Noppon Saengkham in the final qualifying round. Lu Haotian and Chang Bingyu both get to skip the opening round and could be dangerous in this section. The four players entering in the first round are Gao Yang, Paul Davison, Sohail Vahedi and the Belgian amateur Julien Leclerq.
Group 5
This is a group which will also get a fair amount of attention as well, not least because it contains the former world champion Graeme Dott who has become something of a qualifying specialist in recent times, but also it has the ladies world champion Reanna Evans in it too. Dott comes in during the third round while Evans enters from the opening round. Sunny Akani is the other player who comes in as late as possible. Eden Sharav and Jamie Jones are the men who skip the opening round. The other three players who have to go all the way to make it through are Andy Hicks, Billy Joe Castle and Connor Benzey.
Group 6
Michael Holt enters Group 6 as the highest ranked player in it. He probably hasn’t had the season he would have liked but none of that will matter if he makes it to Sheffield and you’d have to say he’s landed a nice section because the other top seed in the group, Li Hang, has been even worse this term. Jamie Jones will probably have a point to prove here having been off the tour for a while. He has shown signs of being competitive early in the campaign. He, along with Andrew Higginson, will come in during the second round. There are only three players entering in the first round after Amine Amiri pulled out. David Lilley gets a bye into the second round. Brandon Sargeant and the other woman in the field, Rebecca Kenna, are the other two in this group.
Group 7
There is a bit of a Chinese feel about Group 7 of the draw with the UK Championship semi-finalist Lu Ning one of the higher seeds in it. Liang Wenbo is the other one and they could be the ones to play out to make it to the Crucible. Six more players will be looking to deny them with Jimmy Robertson beginning in the second round knowing he has to win his first match to stay on the tour while Yuan Sijun will be looking to put an ordinary season behind him. The four players who come in from the first round are Zhao Jianbo, Ross Muir, the veteran Rod Lawler and Alex Borg.
Group 8
Joe Perry is one of the highest seeded players in the entire qualifying competition and he heads up the field in Group 8 and will probably be a hot favourite to qualify. Mark Davis is the other top seed in this group while the two players entering the draw in the second round are the consistent Stuart Carrington who almost made the final of the Gibraltar Open last month, and Jamie O’Neill who is probably better than his ranking suggests. Jamie Clarke made it all the way to the Crucible last season and will look to do so again from the first round here. Iulian Boiko, Fergal O’Brien and Fergal Quinn make up the draw.
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Group 9
Thepchaiya Un-Nooh is another high ranked player in this draw and he will look to navigate his way through to the Crucible from this group. The final stages will be much better with the Thai in it but for him to get there he has to see off the other leading seed in Mark Joyce. This is not an easy section at all because the two second round entrants, Robbie Williams and Anthony Hamilton, can all play on their day, while Rory McLeod, the French amateur Brian Ochoiski, Igor Figueiredo and Farakh Ajaib complete the line up in this section.
Group 10
Ryan Day came back to prominence when he won the Snooker Shootout and that elevated his ranking enough for him to enter qualifying in the third round. He may well have to see off another seasoned campaigner in the form of Ricky Walden in order to make it back to the Crucible. Louis Heathcote and Luo Honghao are the two men who are coming in from the second round and both are probably better than what they have offered so far. The same can be said of Ashley Carty who has done little since making it all the way through qualifying last year. He comes in from the first round as do Michael White, Peter Lines and Mark Lloyd.
Group 11
Martin Gould revived his career in this qualifying competition last year and if he is going to make it to the Crucible Theatre once again then he will have to go it from here. He comes in during the third round as does Ben Woollaston while the experienced Alan McManus and Daniel Wells are the players entering the fray from the second round. Allan Taylor, Bai Langning, Duane Jones and the amateur player Hayden Staniland are the four men who will need to win four matches to make it through.
Group 12
There may be a fair amount of scrutiny on this group as well as the semi-finalist of two years ago Gary Wilson will be under huge pressure to make it back to the Crucible as he has £100,000 coming off his ranking as a result of that run in 2019. He could probably have done without the Welsh Open winner Jordan Brown landing in his section. Brown qualified from deep last year and only needs to win half the matches this year as a result of that triumph in Newport. Two veterans come in from the second round in David Grace and Gerard Greene, while the first round entrants are Steven Hallworth, Dean Young, Sean Maddocks and the man who made a name for himself when beating Ronnie O’Sullivan as an amateur two years ago in James Cahill.
Group 13
Ali Carter has been in fine form since the turn of the year and he’ll be expected to not only qualify for the main draw but be dangerous when he gets there. He has landed in a tricky group here though with Martin O’Donnell a competent challenger as one of the top seeds. Pang Junxu has a lot of people taking highly of him and he comes in from the second round along with Alexander Ursenbacher. Si Jiahui, Hamim Hussain, Peter Devlin and Lukas Kleckers all ensure this entire group is going to be very competitive.
Group 14
There is a bit of an Asian flavour to the main seeds in Group 14 where the talented Zhao Xintong is the highest ranked player although he will be made to work hard by Hossein Vafaei should they meet in the final qualifying round. There is plenty of work for both to do to get there though because the two second round entrants, Jackson Page and Sam Craigie, are both extremely talented. Kacper Filipiak, Riley Parsons, Aaron Hill and Ashley Hugill will all be looking to win a couple of matches and make a name for themselves.
Group 15
Many still wonder to this day how Matthew Stevens hasn’t won this tournament in the past. If he is to give himself another chance at glory this is the group he will have to come through and he’ll need to overcome Xiao Guodong as the other top seed in it. Chris Wakelin and Ian Burns are the men to join from the second round and neither of those will be pushovers. Lei Peifan, with a recent win over Neil Robertson on his CV, the talented Belgian youngster Ben Mertens, Simon Lichtenberg and Ivan Kakovskii make up the group.
Group 16
When you consider it was only six years ago that Stuart Bingham won this fine tournament it is a surprise to see him involved in qualifying this year but he is and he’ll attempt to come out of the last group. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to have seen Luca Brecel in his section as the Belgian can be a danger for anyone. The veteran Mark King is another who could cause problems in this part of the draw. Chen Zifan is the other man coming in during the second round but he will need an upturn in form to make it through. The four first round entrants are Ben Hancorn, Florian Nuble, Mitchell Mann and Robbie McGuigan and it would be a surprise if any of them go particularly deep.
Betting
I’ll go with four bets for the outright qualifying markets. The first of those comes in the form of a favourites treble which I don’t see failing. That is on Graeme Dott, Joe Perry and Tom Ford to win their groups. I can’t see who beats Graeme Dott, especially as he juiced his cue arm up in the Championship League last week. Sunny Akani is the next best seed in his group and over 19 frames I don’t see him beating Dott and the same goes for Eden Sharav or Tian Pengfei. Ford has a slightly more difficult task in that Chang Bingyu is a decent enough player as is Noppon Saengkham but the latter has had a terrible season while Perry is in with a bunch of solid campaigners but I think he’s the best of the lot. He’s more vulnerable to big scorers these days and there isn’t any of those in his group so I expect those three to be walking through the curtain at the Crucible in a couple of weeks.
We saw a lot of unfancied qualifiers last year but that was because the tour basically had three months off before the qualifying event which isn’t the case this season so I don’t expect many outsiders to come through this year but there are three which I think are worth carrying my money. The first of those is Jamie Jones who has more than a point to prove. This is his first year back on tour after effectively being thrown off it for his part in a betting issue. He’s had a decent first year back and if he was to finish it at the Crucible that would be a real success. He has a couple of vulnerable seeds in his section in Michael Holt and Li Hang and he’s also had a touch that the man he plays in the second round won’t have had a match before then after Amine Amiri withdrew. This feels open so the 14/5 on Jones qualifying looks big enough to me.
In Group 7 the Chinese pair of Lu Ning and Liang Wenbo are the seeded players but Ning has done little other than a run to the UK Championship semi-final and a win or two in Gibraltar while you never know what you are going to get out of Liang Wenbo. In truth, Wenbo should qualify from this section but Jimmy Robertson and Yuan Sijun seriously need the points. Robertson needs to win his first match else he’s off the tour so that round two match is basically his world final. If he wins that to set up a clash with Lu Ning he could easily free up with the main job done and relax and show his best form. That best form was enough to win him a ranking title a few years ago so there could be plenty of mileage in the 15/2 on Robertson making it back to the Crucible.
Down in Group 9 there are another couple of vulnerable seeds. As I said above the main draw will be all the better if Thepchaiya Un-Nooh gets into it but he’s the very definition of hit or miss and for much of this season he has been miss much more than hit. Mark Joyce is the other leading seed and he can hang around on his day but he’s little more than a plodder really and hasn’t had a great season himself. I happen to think this is a group where someone could come from deep and make it through and with Robbie Williams and Anthony Hamilton coming in during the second round I fancy one of those to take this group down. You never truly know what state Hamilton is going to be in health wise though so I’m happy to go with Williams, a player who has made the quarter final of the English Open this season and the last 16 in the Scottish Open. He hasn’t done a huge amount since the turn of the year but it has taken Stuart Bingham, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump to beat him in the last three events. He won’t be facing any of them here so the 11/2 on him looks a big price.
Tips
Back G.Dott, T.Ford & J.Perry to qualify for a 2/10 stake at 6.23 with Boylesports
Back R.Williams to qualify for a 1/10 stake at 6.50 with Boylesports
Back them here:
WON – Back J.Jones to qualify for a 2/10 stake at 3.80 with Betfred
Back J.Robertson to qualify for a 1/10 stake at 8.50 with Coral
Back him here:
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