The first round of the Northern Ireland Open tournament concludes inside the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on Tuesday and the second round of the latest Home Nations event gets underway on another busy day of snooker.
The first round of the competition concludes across the morning and the afternoon on Tuesday with the evening session seeing the second round get underway and with plenty of star names on show we should get an excellent day of action.
Morning Session
With the extended day in this tournament we rarely have a full schedule in the early stages of the event and that is the case in the morning session on Tuesday as just two matches take place. The main table action will see the winner of the opening competition of the season meeting a former world champion when Stephen Maguire takes on Luca Brecel. Over on one of the other tables Zhang Anda will look to make it into the second round when he faces off against the veteran Mark Davis.
Afternoon Session
We have an afternoon session where only two tables are in operation in the two sets of matches. On the main table to get the action going is the defending champion Kyren Wilson. He begins his title defence with a date against the talented Oliver Lines. When we are on the subject of talent, Si Jiahui is the star who will grace the other table in the opening part of the afternoon. He has an all-Asian clash with Ka Wai Cheung to attempt to come through.
The second part of the afternoon will see the Shanghai Masters finalist Ali Carter opening up his campaign on the main table. He will meet the extremely talented Stan Moody who was one of the better players to come through the qualifying competition. The other match sees two men who are no strangers to playing at this level battling it out in what could be a close contest as Matthew Selt takes on the qualifier Ryan Day.
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Evening Session
The second round of the tournament begins in the evening session and it does so with all three tables on show in the first part of proceedings. The main table will be occupied by the former champion Judd Trump and the extremely talented Jackson Page while on one of the other tables we have a good looking match between Chris Wakelin and Tom Ford which could go very close. There is an all-Chinese battle in the other contest as Yuan Sijun meets Long Zehuang.
Just the two matches take place in the latter part of the evening and on the main table the legend John Higgins will be on show. He looks to make it through to the last 16 when he meets the competent Pang Junxu, who will be hoping to kick his season into life this week. Two men who don’t need to do that because they have gone pretty well so far this term face off on the other main table when the former finalist Barry Hawkins takes on Aaron Hill.
Betting
Stan Moody has dumped Ali Carter out of two tournaments this season, beating him 4-3 in the British Open and then 5-3 in the Xi’an Grand Prix with the latter of those victories coming just last week, so I don’t really get how he is solid odds against to dispose of the Captain here. Carter started the season really well but since the Saudi Masters he has played 10 matches and only won six of them so his confidence doesn’t look as high as it did when he made the final in Shanghai earlier in the campaign.
Moody is having a wonderful season. He made the quarter final of the Wuhan Open and of the British Open and nobody would be surprised if he goes further than that in a tournament at some stage over the course of the campaign. He is talented, fearless and never looks to be short of confidence and knowing that he has won both meetings against Carter, and both of them were fairly recently, he should fancy his chances of completing a pretty quick hattrick. I’ll go with Moody here.
Tips
Back S.Moody to beat A.Carter for a 3/10 stake at 2.20 with William Hill
Back him here:
