The snooker season heads back to England this week for the popular invitational tournament the Champion of Champions, an event which is gaining in prestige as 16 recent competition winners and high ranked players line up looking to win the £150,000 first prize.
Mark Allen was the man who came out on top in this tournament a year ago and he’ll enter the event looking to pick up a first title of the season. The field in this competition is always strong and that is no different here.
Recent Winners
2023 – Mark Allen
2022 – Ronnie O’Sullivan
2021 – Judd Trump
2020 – Mark Allen
2019 – Neil Robertson
2018 – Ronnie O’Sullivan
2017 – Shaun Murphy
2016 – John Higgins
2015 – Neil Robertson
2014 – Ronnie O’Sullivan
The Format
16 players have qualified for the tournament and they will all be placed into one of the four groups of four players. One group is played out on each of the first four days of the tournament with the semi-finals in the afternoon over the best of seven frames before the final of each group takes place in the evening session on the same day. That is over the best of 11 frames. The winners of each group go through to the overall semi-finals which take place over 11 frames on Friday evening and Saturday night before the winner is determined in a best of 19 frame final on Sunday.
Group 1
The defending champion is always the number one seed in a tournament which means that Mark Allen has been drawn in Group 1 and he will be the favourite to come through it. The Scottish Open and Welsh Open winner Gary Wilson is the next highest ranked player in the section while the World Championship finalist Jak Jones is also in this group. The opening group of the tournament is completed by the World Seniors champion Igor Figueiredo in what looks a bit of a lopsided part of the draw.
Group 2
Four top 16 players make up the section in Group 2 where we have the UK Championship winner Ronnie O’Sullivan heading up proceedings. He will be joined in this group by the British Open champion Mark Selby as well as the player who recently came out on top in the Wuhan Open in Xiao Guodong. There is one player in this group who is in the tournament on the world ranking list rather than what he has won over the last 12 months. That is Shaun Murphy who completes a very tough looking section.
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Group 3
Group 3 is another tasty looking affair with the world champion Kyren Wilson being the headline attraction in the section. He is in good form having won two titles since he won the World Championship and will be the favourite to come out of this section. The Tour Championship winner Mark Williams will be out to stop Wilson coming out of the group while Luca Brecel has made it into the tournament on the world rankings. Bai Yulu is the women’s world champion and she completes the four-player group.
Group 4
There is always a ‘group of death’ in these events which have a group system in them and this week it is the bottom group of the draw where the Shanghai Masters, Saudi Masters and plenty of other events winner Judd Trump heads up the action. The Championship League winner Ali Carter is also in this group as is the English Open winner Neil Robertson who is back in the tournament after missing out on it last year. Ding Junhui is the last man into the field having won the International Championship on Sunday and he probably has a free hit as a result of that.
Betting
There is never too much in the way of value in this tournament with the way the draw is structured. Some of the minor event winners who get in aren’t going to be that competitive and the better event winners tend to have been drawn in the same groups here and of course only one of them are going to come out of each one so it isn’t a tournament where I go looking for too much in the terms of outright value. There is one bet that I think could be a decent runner though.
That comes in the form of Gary Wilson who has had a bit of a dog of a season so far but who won two titles last term which shows that he is a leading player in the world. Out of nowhere though he made the quarter final of the International Championship last week where he was 5-3 up on Xu Si before the Chinese player pulled out three decent breaks to win the match 6-5 so maybe Wilson is trending in the right direction. Wilson is in a group with Mark Allen who is in no real form, Igor Figueiredo who isn’t even a professional and Jak Jones who has done little since he made the world final. At 25/1 I’ll pay to see what Gary Wilson has here.
Tips
Back G.Wilson to win Champion of Champions (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 26.00 with Unibet (1/2 1-2)
