China’s biggest snooker tournament gets underway on Sunday when 64 of the best in the game head to Asia for the International Championship.
You can always tell the size of a tournament not just by the prize fund but by the format and this event has a really solid one of each. There is a cool £125,000 to the winner this week and every match is the best of 11 from the start before best of 17 and 19 for the semi-finals and final.
Ricky Walden landed the title last year so he begins the event as the number one seed but nearly every big name will be out to dethrone him as champion. The exception to that along with Ronnie O’Sullivan who never entered the event is Judd Trump. Trump lost in the qualifying round.
The likes of Neil Robertson, Mark Selby, world champion Stuart Bingham, John Higgins and Ding Junhui are all in the field this week so we are set for a really high quality week of snooker.
The season hasn’t really got going fully yet, in fact I often say this is the tournament the season gets going in, so looking at the recent form to try and determine the winner of the event is largely pointless especially as the majority of the competitions that have gone before this have been over shorter distances.
The longer format usually plays into the hands of the better players so that gives us a little freedom both with match betting and tournament betting but that’s not to say we should ignore the lesser players but it is unlikely an up and comer will win this.
With Trump out of the tournament and Walden the number one seed the top half of the draw looks wide open. Aside from Ding Junhui there isn’t what you would call a potentially elite player in there but whether we can trust Ding yet remains to be seen.
The likes of Mark Williams, Mark Allen, Barry Hawkins, Matthew Stevens and Ali Carter have all won prestigious events in their careers and it would be no surprise if one of those went deep here but I’ll take a relative local man in the top half.
That man is Marco Fu. Fu was a runner up here two years ago so we know he can perform under these conditions and with his record in the UK Championship too the longer matches clearly suit the man from Hong Kong. Fu looks to have landed in a really nice portion of the draw and after a nice tune up in the Asian event last week he should go really well at 33/1.
The bottom half of the draw is loaded with much more potential tournament winning talent. Mark Selby, Neil Robertson, Shaun Murphy, Stuart Bingham, Graeme Dott and John Higgins all sit in this section of the draw and all have won the biggest tournaments in the game so this is likely to be competitive.
I’m going to look at the bottom quarter of the draw though because Bingham’s season hasn’t really got going yet and Murphy often looks great but doesn’t deliver what he should.
That leaves me with John Higgins in this section. Higgins has already won a tournament this season when he landed the Australian Open at the start of the campaign so we know he’s in good touch and this sort of event is right up his street. He doesn’t have many easy matches but he’s so good every match can be easy when he’s playing well.
I think this is going to be a big season for the Scot now he has his eye much more on the ball again and he is a fair price to add this event to the one in Australia and prove he is really back.
I can’t have an outright preview where Walden is the main seed in a quarter without getting involved in that quarter.
Mark Allen is the obvious place to go for a winner in this quarter but he is far from a certainty although he was the runner up to Walden last year. He’s a little too short to me as is Mark Williams given that he has been recovering from a shoulder surgery so far this season.
Both Thepchaiya Un-Nooh and Kyren Wilson have won tournaments this season already so they shouldn’t be completely ignored but I’ve had Martin Gould on my list of players to watch all season and I’m not going to desert him at a double figure price here.
Gould was due to run into Trump in the second round but that obviously won’t happen now so he’s in a nice portion of the draw and even Williams in the last 16 isn’t the toughest draw in the world. With big, in form names few and far between in this section it looks set for someone to come through at a nice price and that can be Martin Gould.
Back M.Fu to win International Championship (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 34.00 with Sportingbet (1/2 1-2)
Back J.Higgins to win International Championship (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 21.00 with Skybet (1/2 1-2)
Back M.Gould to win 1st Quarter for a 1/10 stake at 11.00 with Boylesports
Blog snooker YTD: +46.57pts
