The lucrative inaugural staging of the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters gets underway in the Kingdom on Friday when the first round of the tournament is played out. This is the stage where the players ranked 81-128 in the world are joined by the wildcards.
Each of these players know that they are four wins away from a meeting with a seeded player but the money for this tournament jumps up quite quickly so even a couple of wins can make a real difference to careers.
Afternoon Session
We have two sets of matches in both of the sessions on Friday and first up in the afternoon session we have the highest ranked player in this round in Rory Thor taking to the tables. He faces off against the home player Omar Alajlani while Robbie McGuigan, the next highest ranked player meets Abdulraouf Sayegh who will want to impress in his home event. Two former women’s world champions are also on show in the first part of the event. Reanne Evans meets Simon Blackwell while Baipat Siripaporn goes up against the amateur Mohamed Elkhayat. Four other matches take place at this part of the day with Chris Totten taking on Haris Tahir, Allan Taylor squaring off with a home amateur in Adeel Aqdus, Michael Holt facing Ahmad Abul and Oliver Lines playing Faisal Bahashwan.
The second part of the afternoon is headed up by the Scottish player Liam Graham. He takes on Ali Hussain Ali for a spot in the second round while Farakh Ajaib meets Haitham Al Mahri. The Belgian pair of Ben Mertens and Julien Leclercq are in need of big campaigns and they’ll start their quest to boost their rankings against Abdullah Alotayyani and Dylan Emery respectively. Mink Nutcharut will be looking to make it into the second round when she faces Kusal Hamed Sharif while Ka Wai Cheung meets Joshua Thomond in what could be the pick of the matches in the afternoon. Artemijs Zizins faces Lim Kok Leong and Lei Paifan goes up against Bai Yulu in the other two games.
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Evening Session
Andrew Pagett is the highest ranked player in the draw in the first part of the evening session and his match with Wang Yuchen should be decent enough but I think it is fair to say that all of the attention will be on Jimmy White as he looks to make it through to the second round. He meets possible the best player from the middle east in Mohammed Shedab while also in this session Huang Jiahao takes on Ahmed Aly Elsayed and Antoni Kowalski will look to make a huge leap up the rankings in his first season on tour when he faces Habib Subah Humood. The other four matches in the first part of this session pit professionals against amateurs with Gong Chenzhi taking on Ali Jalil Ali, Mitchell Mann facing Paul Deaville in a good looking match while Haydon Pinhey faces Ayman Alamri and two European youngsters meet when Bulcsu Revesz faces Iulian Boiko.
The second part of the evening session has some decent names on show even this early in the tournament. Stan Moody is in the second year of his tour card so he knows he needs to work his way up the rankings over the course of the campaign and a win over Ziyad Alqabbani would be a good start. Liam Davies is on show in this session too. He faces the former world champion Ken Doherty while Duane Jones will look to make progress against Khaled Al Kamali. Zak Surety is another who needs a few wins and he’ll be expecting to pick one up against Ali Al Obaidly. An intriguing match sees Kreishh Gurbaxani facing Sunny Akani who has come back to the tour in good shape while elsewhere Dean Young plays Saleh Alamoudi, Mostafa Dorgham takes on Jonas Luz and Manasawin Phetmalaikul plays Amir Sarkhosh.
Betting
This was always going to be a relatively quiet start to the tournament for me betting wise because we have a lot of unknown amateurs mixed in with the professionals who really shouldn’t be being beaten by the home players at this stage in the Saudi snooker development but nobody really knows how many players this down the rankings will cope with being the favourite for a snooker match in a tournament which has this importance on their careers. There is one bet I think is value though which will do for me on the opening day.
That comes in the form of Bulcsu Revesz to get the better of Iulian Boiko. To be fair to Boiko, he has started the season fairly well but he is still an amateur and I actually think having watched a bit of Revesz so far that he’ll turn into quite a decent player. The Hungarian probably hasn’t had the results he would have wanted so far but he took a couple of frames of Pang Junxu in Wuhan Open qualifying and trounced David Grace 5-0 to make the Xi’an Grand Prix and then won a couple of frames off Ronnie O’Sullivan when he was there. It has to be said that Boiko has drawn with Robert Milkins and Jackson Page this season but I don’t think there is as much between these two as the odds would suggest. Boiko has had plenty of chances to build a book of results that would get him on the tour without needing Q-School and hasn’t taken them. Revesz had some great wins on the amateur circuit last season and I think he’ll progress to make a half decent pro and at 13/10 I think there is value in him here.
Tips
Back B.Revesz to beat I.Boiko for a 3/10 stake at 2.30 with Boylesports
Back him here:
