The opening evening of The Masters will see the former winner Mark Selby beginning his quest to stay on track to claim all of the Triple Crown events this season when he takes on the Wuhan Open winner Xiao Guodong in the first round at Alexandra Palace.
Both these men have hoisted significant silverware this season and will be confident heading into what should be a decent match to grace the first night of action in the elite invitation event with a quarter final spot on the line.
Mark Selby
This is turning into a brilliant season for Mark Selby and it probably will be even if he doesn’t win another match for the remainder of the campaign. He has won the Champion of Champions and the UK Championship and he looks to be full of confidence right now. His win in the latter of those events has taken care of his world ranking for a while and the former tells us that the former winner of this event can beat the best there is in the game so he should be in decent spirits driving to Alexandra Palace.
If there is a concern for Selby then it comes in a really poor recent record in this tournament. Some of that is down to him dropping lower in the rankings than he was when he was winning this event three times in quick succession but you do wonder if this is a venue that just doesn’t agree with him. Selby hasn’t been past the quarter final of this tournament since the last time he made the final in 2014 and that has to be a concern, albeit he has won his last two first round matches.
Xiao Guodong
This is a second season in succession that Xiao Guodong has won a tournament so he is establishing himself as one of the top players in the game after what seemed like a couple of decades in the shadow of Ding Junhui in the battle for Chinese superiority. Guodong made a successful defence of his Wuhan Open title earlier in the season, but you would have to say that apart from that this has largely been a fairly quiet campaign for the Chinese cueist.
Guodong is fairly new into the top 16 though and as a result of that this will be his debut in The Masters let alone at Alexandra Palace so it will be interesting to see how he settles in this incredible arena. To be fair, he has gone well in similar setups at tournaments like the Champion of Champions and the Players Series events, but this is a bit special. He comes in here off the back of plenty of activity at the Championship League last week which should serve him well.
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Head-to-head
These two men have met on 11 previous occasions with Mark Selby having had the better of it as you would expect. He holds a 7-4 advantage in past meetings but that stretches to 53-35 when you put it in the format of the frame score so often his wins are by a fair margin. This will clearly be their first meeting at The Masters with this being the Xiao Guodong debut in the tournament but three of their meetings have been over the best of 11 frames. Selby has won two of the three, but it was Guodong who won their last match in the quarter final of the Champion of Champions last season.
Betting
A lot of this match is going to be about how quickly and how well Xiao Guodong settles. He has been around forever but this will be the first time he has played in this tournament and having not played in the other big invitational events like in Saudi and things there is a chance he doesn’t settle. If he does, he has shown that he can go with Mark Selby in some decent events and with not much to lose given that everyone expects Selby to win, the Chinese player might be able to show his best stuff.
I’m not going to guess how Guodong settles though but at the same time I don’t really want to have him involved in any bets so I’m going to make my bet on this match all about Selby. The one thing which has been noticeable in recent times is how well Selby is scoring. He is no bigger than 4/9 to make a century in this match but you can get 5/6 on him upping that ton to a break of more than 110.5 which feels like a risk worth taking. We saw in the earlier game that the table is playing fairly easy around the black spot so any ton that is made could easily be a big one. Selby has made a 111 break or more in two of his last three against Guodong so that will form my Sunday evening punt.
Tips
Back M.Selby – Over 110.5 break for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Betway
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