The qualifying event for the European Masters may only have finished on Wednesday evening but such is the stacked schedule in the snooker world these days another qualifying event begins on Thursday when the International Championship qualifiers begin.
With no disrespect to the European Masters this is a much more important tournament and as such all the matches are the best of 11 frames. With prize money in the main event pretty big everyone will be wanting to win this and secure at least £4,000 for making the main draw.
Morning Session
Eight matches take place in this first session of the day. As with the European Masters, the majority of the really big names have been left for later in the week and as such Anthony McGill is the star name in this session. He faces Thor Chuan Leong with Thepchaiya Un-Nooh the other member of the top 32 in action against Jak Jones.
The other matches sees Nigel Bond playing Eden Sharav, Mark Joyce facing Darryl Hill, Matthew Stevens plays Adam Duffy, Fergal O’Brien against Fraser Patrick, Ken Doherty against Allan Taylor and finally Andrew Higginson against Jimmy White.
Afternoon Session
The bigger names begin to appear in this session with Ricky Walden and Martin Gould on the green baize. Gould faces the form horse in Scott Donaldson while Walden has the amateur Ashley Hugill. Both are banana skins.
In the other matches Jimmy Robertson plays Bradley Jones, Zhou Yuelong has Steven Hallworth, Alan McManus takes on Chris Wakelin, David Grace plays Rhys Clark, Graeme Dott meets David John and Peter Ebdon plays John Astley.
Evening Session
Eyes on this session will be on only one table and it is the one which Ronnie O’Sullivan is on. He takes on James Cahill on what will surely be a streamed match. Mark Williams is another option when he faces Alex Borg.
Elsewhere Ian Burns plays Lu Chenwei, Ben Woollaston faces a banana skin in Zhao Xintong, Tom Ford meets Brandon Sargeant while Rory McLeod plays Wang Yuchen. Dave Gilbert plays Gareth Allen and Dechawat Poomjaeng plays James Wattana in an interesting all-Thai battle.
Betting
I’m not going too mad to begin with in these matches. There is a lot of snooker to be played in the next few weeks so picking and choosing bets is going to be a key strategy through this period but there are two I like on Thursday.
The first is on Scott Donaldson who is in some real form at the minute. He is clearly better than his lowly ranking suggests and having almost beaten Ding in China last week he then took care of Stuart Bingham in the European Masters qualifying on Wednesday so he has real momentum about him now.
Donaldson faces a Martin Gould who has lost two matches he would have expected to win in the last week or so and who might just be starting to struggle for a little bit of confidence and morale and we know how good he is when he is confident but he is also not the best when he is out of touch so I’m going to take a punt that Donaldson can continue his good form and come through that at a nice price.
The other bet I like is Mark Williams to breeze through. Williams hasn’t been in the best of form in recent times it should be said but he has had a dream draw here against Alex Borg who has lost every match he has played this season and who without meaning to be disrespectful is very limited at the best of times.
Not only has Borg lost every match this season he has only made two breaks of 50 or more and by this stage of the campaign that is insane. You simply don’t beat Mark Williams or even get close to him if you don’t score. Williams might not score as well as he once did but he makes up for that with tactical nous and smart snooker. He still takes chances he is given and I’m sure he’ll get enough here to run out a winner no worse than 6-2.
Tips
Back S.Donaldson to beat M.Gould for a 3/10 stake at 3.75 with Betfred
WON – Back M.Williams (-3.5 frames) to beat A.Borg for a 4/10 stake at 1.91 with Betfred
Back them here:
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