Following yesterday’s wildcard round at the season’s first APTC event, today saw the first of the professionals (Ding Junhui aside), take to the baize and it proved to be a day of upsets as nine tour players fell at the first fence, more than were able to progress…
Photo by Stuart Bingham
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Scotland’s Stephen Maguire came into this event as the second-highest ranked player and someone who I had expected to go close to claiming the title, but today he became one of the many fancied men to exit the tournament at the last 64 stage. Indeed it was to prove a day to forget for Stephen as he lost 4-0 to China’s Cao Kaisheng, who also competed in a main tour event back at the 2009 China Open.
Maguire was far from the only professional to fall however as the likes of Peter Ebdon, Marcus Campbell, Mark King and Matt Selt also exited the tournament at the hands of local players, as well as Australia’s Ben Judge. For the likes of King and Selt, both having failed to qualify for the Wuxi Classic, it is a long way to fly to play just one match, but they should at least earn 360 ranking points for their trouble, having ‘reached’ the last 64 stage which is normally of course the second round at a PTC event.
As well as the British players however, there were also to be surprise exits for three leading Chinese players as Xiao Guodong, Liu Chuang and Cao Yupeng also suffered defeat today at the hands of lesser-known opponents.
It was not all bad news for the main tour players though as Mark Williams, Stuart Bingham and Tom Ford were among the eight to progress today, as well as Chinese contingent Zhang Anda, Li Yan, Yu Delu, Tian Pengfei and Chen Zhe.
All being told, it is difficult to report on the event beyond the basic match scores as information appears to be somewhat limited, though as ever your blog comments such as here do help to flesh out just what is going on over in China and how the event is structured. On the positive side though, the venue looks to be an ideal setting judging by the images posted by Stuart Bingham on his Twitter account today, with three feature tables supplemented by other ‘outside’ tables.
Looking at the results at this early stage, it is hard not to fancy the winner to come from close to home, though there remain a number of professionals still in the draw who might well have something to say about that…