The second quarter final at The Masters takes place inside the Alexandra Palace in London on Thursday evening and it is a repeat of a match from the same stage last year as Mark Allen meets Mark Selby in a clash of the former champions.
Another former title holder awaits the winner of this one in the semi-final with the victor going through to take on Shaun Murphy for a spot in the final on Sunday and a crack at the Paul Hunter Trophy so this is a huge match.
Mark Allen
These are the kind of occasions that Mark Allen plays the game for and having come into the tournament off the back of winning the invitational event in Saudi Arabia last month, he looked more fluent and probably better than we’ve seen him for a while as a result in his opening match against Si Jiahui. That sounds a bit daft considering that Allen has been to the semi-finals of four big tournaments prior to winning that Saudi event but each time you watched him he was giving a pint of blood.
Allen, as most players are, is at his best when he is aggressive, looking to attack the balls and can have some fluency as a result of that and it will be interesting to see if that is his approach here or whether he has more respect and perhaps fear of Selby and reverts to keeping things tight and grounding out anything that he gets here. He can win both ways but if he wants to push on and win this tournament then you would think he has to play like he did against Si Jiahui.
Mark Selby
Mark Selby has looked close to his best for a lot of this season, which is extremely welcome when you consider the personal troubles that he has gone through over the last couple of years ago. He arrived at Alexandra Palace as the British Open champion but also a multiple Masters winner and on the evidence of his first round performance he is here looking to regain the title because he was pretty much flawless in dismantling Ali Carter to make it into this quarter final.
Selby had been performing well at the Championship League earlier in the month where he was knocking in centuries for fun and he added two more to his collection in the opening round and made a 93 on top of that. When Selby scores like that he is a massive danger for anyone so the task for him will be to get as close as he possibly can to the scoring he showed in the first round. We know he can outlast anyone but if he can outscore Allen here it will bode very well.
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Head-to-head
These two men are no strangers to taking each other on. They have done it on 20 previous occasions and Mark Allen has the edge, leading 11-9. That tight lead is evidenced in the frame count where Allen leads by only 114-110. That would suggest that a lot of matches are quite tight and that is very much the case. These two have met in nine previous quarter finals including at this stage of this tournament last year. Allen has won seven of the previous nine with just two for Selby. This will be their fourth meeting at The Masters with Selby having won two of the previous three. It is Allen who leads 6-4 in their meetings over the best of 11 frames.
Betting
Whichever way I look at this match, I just can’t get away from it being a tight game and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we are enjoying a decider deep into the evening. Incredibly, eight of their 10 matches over the best of 11 frames have gone the distance including all three of the matches that they have played at The Masters and with both men looking in good touch in the first round but also having the ability to shut things down should they need to, I don’t see how this is much different.
The frame line for this one is 9.5 and that would give us a 6-4 score in either way as well as the 6-5 so that does look like a good bet. These are two of the best players in the world in all departments of the game and so I don’t expect either to dominate here. There hasn’t been much evidence of one-sided contests between these two in their career meetings so far. Then when you add in the huge opportunity to go big this week that is in front of them I fully expect over 9.5 frames here.
Tips
Back Over 9.5 frames for a 3/10 stake at 2.00 with Betfair
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