The qualifying competition for the Welsh Open, the final Home Nations event of the season, begins on Tuesday when a bunch of players get their bid to make it through to the final stages underway on a busy day of snooker.
The top 32 have qualified for the tournament automatically and over the next three days the rest of the tour will battle it out looking to join them and that should ensure that we get some competitive action throughout the day.
Morning Session
Ishpreet Singh Chadha is the highest ranked player in the opening round of qualifying and he gets his quest to make it through underway when he takes on the former women’s world champion Baipat Siripaporn. Five other matches take place in the morning session with the popular Allan Taylor taking on Haris Tahir in one of them while Andrew Higginson takes on Daniel Womersley. The Shootout finalist Liam Graham is another on show in this session. He meets Iulian Boiko and the other match sees Dean Young facing off against Mitchell Mann.
Early Afternoon Session
We have two sessions of action in the afternoon on Tuesday and the first of those will see Xing Zihao as the highest ranked player on show. He meets Haydon Pinhey while on one of the other tables two Welshmen will look to go to within a win of qualifying for their home tournament when Duane Jones meets Dylan Emery. Antoni Kowalski takes on another home hope looking to make it into the main draw in Liam Davies while the other two matches have Ian Burns facing Mostafa Dorgham and Liam Pullen going up against Kreishh Gurbaxani.
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Later Afternoon Session
Louis Heathcote is the highest ranked player in the later part of the afternoon. He will be looking to qualify for the second round of qualifying at the expense of Robbie McGuigan while also in this session will be Stan Moody. This feels like a big event for him as he looks to remain on the tour at the end of the season. He will hope to beat Chris Totten to boost those chances. Oliver Lines won a pro-am on Sunday and he’ll look to take the confidence of that into a clash with Ahmed Aly Elsayed while Zak Surety will meet Wang Yuchen, Amir Sarkhosh will play Ka Wai Cheung and Julien Leclercq will take on Reanne Evans.
Evening Session
There are five more matches in the evening session to round off the day and while Alfie Burden is the highest ranked player on show it will be Jimmy White who has all of the attention on him, as ever when the Whirlwind comes to the party. Both men take on amateurs for a spot in the second round. Burden meets Paul Deaville in a great looking match while White faces Joshua Thomond. Michael Holt is another recognisable name on show in this session when he takes on Hatem Yassen while Alexander Ursenbacher goes into a match with Joshua Cooper off the back of a run to the last 16 of the German Masters. Artemijs Zizins faces Farakh Ajaib in the other game.
Betting
The opening day of this competition is an awkward one to bet on because in the main the majority of the players on show will be playing their first competitive match of the year and given that they are lowly ranked reliability for most players is probably having to be taken on trust rather than anything else. There might be one player where that isn’t the case though and that is Ka Wai Cheung, who competed in the German Masters last week and therefore had the chance to shake off the competitive rust.
He takes on Amir Sarkhosh, a player who wasn’t at the German Masters last week so he is entitled to feel rusty. Sarkhosh did beat Cheung when the two met in the qualifying competition for the Northern Ireland Open but I do think the activity factor is a big thing here. The other big thing is the scoring potential. This season, Cheung has made 26 breaks of 70 or more compared to 10 for the Iranian. Cheung also ran Kyren Wilson fairly close last week in Berlin where he went down 5-3 but the three frames he won he did so with runs of 107, 99 and 64 which is no mean effort. A repeat of that and he should come through here with a bit to spare.
Tips
Back K-W.Cheung (-1.5 frames) to beat A.Sarkhosh for a 3/10 stake at 2.20 with Bet365
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