The penultimate day of action in the International Championship qualifiers takes place in Barnsley on Friday as more big names look to seal their spot in the Chinese event.
Friday sees former world champions Graeme Dott, Peter Ebdon and Neil Robertson in action while up and coming stars such as Luca Brecel and Anthony McGill also do battle on the baize.
15 matches will be played over the course of three sessions on Friday and by the end of the day we will know 45 of the 60 players who will qualify for the final stage of the tournament later in the month.
As with Thursday there are a number of one sided matches expected on Friday so finding the value doesn’t appear too easy. The closer matches on paper are between out of form players so this is a tricky card to assess in many ways.
The beauty of this tournament is that all the qualifying matches are the best of 11 frames which gives us a little more comfort to take the handicaps and after a deeper look through the card a couple of handicaps with some space to breath have popped out at me.
The first of them comes in the morning session when Anthony McGill, one of the stars of the World Championship, takes on James Wattana. Wattana hasn’t played much snooker these days as he hasn’t been for a season or two now so you would think it will take him a couple of frames or more to find his range.
Anthony McGill’s season hasn’t really got started yet but he’s lost to a couple of form horses so he might not be too far away from getting back to where he was at the end of last season. This longer match will give him the chance to play with a little more freedom which should in turn see his classy break building come to the fore and I’d expect him to see off the Thai veteran with something to spare.
The other bet I like comes in the evening session on Friday. Tom Ford made it all the way to the final of the opening European Tour event of the season which shows his slump is behind him and I expect him to go from strength to strength on the back of that.
Ford takes on Michael Leslie on Friday night. Leslie has been around for a while now but hasn’t really got anywhere which shows he is fairly limited at the top level. He’ll get the odd result when the draw is kind but I’m not convinced it has been here.
Ford has the scoring power to win matches in one visit and that often gets the job done at this level and I expect it to here as well.
Back A.McGill (-2.5 frames) to beat J.Wattana for a 4/10 stake at 1.75 with Sportingbet
Back T.Ford (-2.5 frames) to beat M.Leslie for a 4/10 stake at 2.00 with Bet365
Blog snooker YTD: +42.37pts
