The countdown is fully on towards the World Championship but before we get there the leading 12 money earners from ranking points this season head to Manchester to compete in the Tour Championship, the last leg of the Players Series.
Mark Williams headed to Sheffield off the back of winning this tournament last year and the veteran is in the field looking to make a successful defence of the crown, but it goes without saying that the other 11 looking to stop him are all form horses.
Recent Winners
2024 – Mark Williams
2023 – Shaun Murphy
2022 – Neil Robertson
2021 – Neil Robertson
2020 – Stephen Maguire
2019 – Ronnie O’Sullivan
The Format
One of the more appealing things about this tournament used to be that with only eight players taking part we have the whole event on one table with one match on each of the seven days of the competition. However that changed last year and the top 12 players on the money list in ranking events this season are invited to the event. The other really inviting thing about this event is that from the quarter finals right the way through to the final every match in the competition is the best of 19 frames and that hasn’t changed. The champion will be decided in the final on Sunday. The players slot into the draw in the position they sit in the money list for this season.
Top Four Seeds
Judd Trump was pretty much guaranteed to be the leading seed heading into this tournament once he won the Saudi Arabia Masters and collected the £500,000 that went with it and that is very much the case. Trump hasn’t had the best start to 2025 though even though he was beaten in the final of the Players Championship earlier in the month. The general school of thought is that the longer the format the better the chances of the better player and there is nobody playing the game better than Trump over the last few seasons. He looks a worthy 7/4 favourite.
Kyren Wilson won that Players Championship final to give him a fourth ranking title of the season as he looks to become the first man to break the Crucible curse in the big one in Sheffield. Wilson might only be the second best player of the season but having won the German Masters and Players Championship and reached the final of The Masters I think it is fair to say that he has been the player of 2025 so far and he will be a popular pick at 4/1 this week.
Neil Robertson won this tournament the last time he was in it and he qualified for this event as one of the top seeds courtesy of adding the World Grand Prix title to the English Open one that he won much earlier in the campaign. The Players Championship yielded a semi-final defeat to Wilson so he arrives in Manchester in decent form and looking to make a big impression. His confidence looks high and he lost nothing in defeat in Telford and might well be the value in the field at 11/2.
The other automatic quarter finalist in this tournament is John Higgins. He is another who is in good form having landed the World Open last month. He followed that up with a run to the semi-finals in Telford where Judd Trump edged him out but the longer format might allow the Scot to get into a nice rhythm and if that is the case then 15/2 could quickly turn out to be a big price, although a semi-final date with Trump would be an obvious stumbling block. Nevertheless, you know you are on a class act if you side with Higgins.
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Other Eight Players
The other eight players in the draw are ranked between 5-12 in the one-year ranking list with the Wuhan Open winner Xiao Guodong being the fifth seed while the British Open and Welsh Open winner Mark Selby slotting in as the sixth seed. Mark Williams is in the Tour Championship despite having not won a ranking event this season but he gets in as the seventh seed while The Masters champion Shaun Murphy comes in as the eighth seed despite his Ally Pally earnings not counting on the ranking list.
The UK Championship and German Masters finalist Barry Hawkins is well-known to enjoy the longer formats and he is the ninth seed this week while the International Championship winner Ding Junhui has also made it into the field as the tenth seed. The other two players in the draw are both Chinese too. They are the Wuhan Open finalist Si Jiahui and the man who reached the title match in the English Open and the Scottish Open in the form of Wu Yize.
Betting
12 man tournaments don’t really throw up big priced winners too often, although Stephen Maguire would have been one when this was an eight-man event but even allowing for the fact that the top four seeds have a big advantage in that they skip the first round and head straight to the quarter finals. Even though Barry Hawkins doesn’t fall into that category, I just can’t ignore a man who relishes the longer matches at 33/1 here.
Hawkins might need to run a bit of a gauntlet to win this title with his worst case scenario draw being Shaun Murphy in the first round, Judd Trump in the quarter final, John Higgins in the semi-final and then Kyren Wilson in the final but we’ve seen at the World Championship in the past that the longer the match the better he has the potential to play. Although he didn’t win the UK Championship or German Masters finals this season he only lost 10-8 to Trump in the former and 10-9 to Wilson in the latter. Murphy beat Hawkins 6-4 in the Players Championship but at 4-4 it was evenly poised and 4-4 at halfway in their first round match would give ‘The Hawk’ a longer chance to come out on top. Hawkins is just too big at 33/1 even allowing for the tough draw.
Tips
Back B.Hawkins to win Tour Championship (e/w) for a 1/10 stake at 34.00 with William Hill (1/2 1-2)
Back him here:
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