The most exciting invitational snooker tournament starts again tonight and is live in the UK on Sky Sports and Sky Player online.
Read a preview to the tournament here:
PartyCasino.com Premier League Snooker 2009 Preview
Ronnie O’Sullivan for his fifth title?
John Higgins - Photo from WorldSnooker.com
World Snooker recently carried out a pool on Worldsnooker.com and from 600 respondents John Higgins was named fans player of the year for the 2008/09 season.
The ‘Wizard of Wishaw’ no doubt achieved the accolade through winning his third world title but he was the only player to lift two world ranking events in the season.
World number 1, Ronnie O’Sullivan, came in second after wins in the Northern Ireland Trophy and the Masters, but probably receives a lot of votes not for his achievements but for his popularity.
In third place was World Championships semi-finalist and Bahrain Championship winner, Neil Robertson.
The full results:
John Higgins 178
Ronnie O’Sullivan 109
Neil Robertson 90
Mark Selby 65
Mark Allen 41
Ali Carter 32
Stephen Hendry 22
Shaun Murphy 21
Judd Trump 8
Ricky Walden 7
Steve Davis 6
Graeme Dott 2
Michael Holt 2
Stephen Maguire 2
Marco Fu 1
Dominic Dale 1
Martin Gould 1
Liang Wenbo 1
Jimmy White 1
Ryan Day 1
Joe Perry 1
Matthew Stevens 1
Joe Swail 1
Mark Williams 1
Vincent Muldoon
Source: World Snooker
Ronnie O’Sullivan has been magnificently sent packing out of this years Betfred World Snooker Championships. Mark Allen, the world number 16, is the man that has sent Ronnie home early and what a victory it was.
A match of the highest quality where the pressure on Allen never really seemed to phase the Northern Ireland star, he wound up a 13-11 winner.
The match had been close throughout the three sessions with Ronnie leading 9-7 overnight. Allen came back the fresher player it seemed this morning winning the first three frames to lead 10-9. In the 20th frame Ronnie responded with a 147 attempt failing to get his 10th maximum by missing a difficult 14th black playing left handed.
Even with everything Ronnie threw at him Mark Allen had the confidence and ability to step into the 1/4 finals for the first time.
In this mornings other match, Shaun Murphy only needed two sessions to demolish former semi-finalist Marco Fu 13-3.
Ronnie O’Sullivan is the first man through to the second round of the 2009 BetFred.com World Snooker Championships. The defending champion served up some brilliant snooker en route to a 10-5 victory over Stuart Bingham.
Amongst the balls both players looked very solid with O’Sullivan notching up 3 centuries, the pinnacle a 140 and Bingham picking up one himself. There were a further 8 breaks over 50 in a match of some very quality break building.
The biggest shock was O’Sullivans ability at distance - at one point his long pot success rate was as low as 35% - this allowed Bingham to get into the balls on two back-to-back occasions, something he took gleefully knocking in 100 and 97 breaks.
The rest of todays scores:
No less than six former World Snooker Champions have made it through the the last eight of the China Open. A couple are well known for their batting qualities, Peter Ebdon, who faces Stephen Hendry (he is also leading 4-1 as I type) and Graeme Dott.
Dott is currently trailing Stuart Pettman 4-1. One of the stories of this tournament has been Pettman who has reached his first ever ranking event 1/4 final in 17 years as a professional. This shows that there is still a lot of quality lower down the world rankings and further adds to the funny season we have had with 6 different winners in six events.
In the other 1/4 finals later today Ronnie O’Sullivan will once again play John Higgins and Shaun Murphy plays Ryan Day.
I have been saying all season that Ryan Day is due a tournament win, could China finally be it?
My title to this post relates really to those players who do not always perform at tournaments outside of the UK. Ronnie O’Sullivan pulled out of the Bahrain event earlier in the year and the other players on show did not perform either. Maybe the tide is changing, snooker has to change to really become a ‘world sport’ and are players starting to accept this?
Whilst playing in an exhibition in front of 600 spectators in Ireland Jimmy White and Ronnie O’Sullivan both compiled maximum 147 breaks in consecutive frames.
First up was Ronnie O’Sullivan who racked up his break with the crowd chanting his name and then came the turn of the Whirlwind, whose break only came about becuase Ronnie had hogged the table and wanted some of the other lads to play, they didn’t get a chance as Jimmy himself bagged a maximum break.
You can read the article from the Sun Newspaper here:
The quarter-finals are over and now is where the real action starts! The semi-finals of the World Snooker Masters start this afternoon, first up is defending champion Mark Selby against one of the most highly regarded match players in the history of snooker, John Higgins.
It should be a very tough game with Selby having played final frame deciders in his first two matches, this could cause a bit of fatigue. On the other hand Higgins looked comfortable in beating Ding Junhui 6-4 and the Scot was never behind.
Read on to find out where you can watch it live…
Ronnie O’Sullivan has once again been controversial in a post-match press conference. You can read about it by following the link below where you will also find a web link to the actual BBC audio clip so you can hear it for yourself. Let us know your thoughts…
Through all the hullabaloo over the Mosconi Cup at the weekend I failed to mention that the UK Championship Snooker was on as well!
The second most prestigious tournament in the World Snooker calendar is being shown live on the BBC in the UK and on BBC interactive with table choice. In addition you can watch a snooker live stream also courtesy of the BBC, I believe that due to contractual issues this stream is only available to UK viewers.
Currently the live streams are:
If you are outside of the UK then I am sorry that you can’t see it. However, I have posted some unofficial (I must stress unofficial) videos posted on YouTube of this years Championships. They are unofficial snooker videos but are of a reasonable quality:
Steve Davis v Ding Junhui (Part 1)
Stephen Maguire v Jamie Burnett (Part 1)
Controversy
Although no statement has been made from World Snooker yet, betting was suspended on the Stephen Maguire v Jamie Burnett match after irregular betting patterns on a 9-3 victory to Stephen. Ironically the match did finish 9-3 so more information will certainly be requested.
All of the YouTube videos above came from:
http://uk.youtube.com/user/snoookerfan92
You can find the full draw here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/snooker/7774168.stm
You can watch live 9-ball pool and live snooker this weekend!
The Mosconi Cup returns for it’s 15th edition and starts tomorrow evening the 11th December live on Sky Sports. The European team (captained this year by Alex Lely) are the defending champions having won the trophy in Las Vegas last year. The tournament MVP last time out was Tony Drago and he will be looking to put on a similar performance as he will be playing in Malta, his home country.
The rest of the European team are Ralf Souquet, Niels Feijen, Mika Immonen and Englands own Mark Gray. European players currently hold all of the world titles and have also been successful in the majors this year as well, Ralf Souquet winning the US Open the highlight.
The US team is captained by Nick Varner and is almost an unchanged side from last year, Earl Strickland returns as the only ever present since this tournament started and is joined by Johnny Archer, Shane van Boening, Jeremy Jones and Rodney Morris.
If snooker is more your tipple then prepare to be mesmerised as the Uk Championships starts on Saturday 13th December from the Telford International Centre. Regarded as the second most prestigious snooker tournament after the World Championships Ronnie O’Suillivan will be on hand to defend the title he won last December.
Other contenders:
