2022 World Championship

[Nifty50]

I know Luca is playing Noppon Saengkham but is there a schedule yet for who's playing when?

http://www.snooker.org/res/index.asp...=24&event=1128
PS. Knock an hour off for UK times. Don’t want to miss any frames.

[Delphi]

Thanks mate, Wednesday and Thursday it is.

[DeanH]

snooker.org has this match on the 20th and 21st.

I have not seen a Format yet to confirm.


edit - they have finally published the format, checking now

yep evening 20th and afternoon 21st

[Delphi]

Pitty; have to work Thursday but i'll survive i guess, wednesday i can watch.

[mikee]

There are some great matches drawn there , bring it on .

I like the look of Stevens and Lisowski

Me too ,both of them should get plenty of chances ,Lisowski will need them as well

[Starsky]

Me too ,both of them should get plenty of chances ,Lisowski will need them as well

Yep, a tight tactical game it won’t be

[fkhan]

I know Luca is playing Noppon Saengkham but is there a schedule yet for who's playing when?

https://livescores.worldsnookerdata....mpionship-2022

Match timings.

[Mr Snooker]

my first round predictions

10-7 Mark Selby [1] v Jamie Jones
10-8 Yan Bingtao [16] v Chris Wakelin
10-5 Barry Hawkins [9] v Jackson Page
10-9 Mark Williams [8] v Michael White

10-6 Kyren Wilson [5] v Ding Junhui
10-4 Stuart Bingham [12] v Lyu Haotian
10-7 Anthony McGill [13] SCO v Liam Highfield Eng
10-5 Judd Trump [4] v Hossen Vafaei

10-3 Neil Robertson [3] v Ashley Hugill
7-10 Jack Lisowski [14] v Matthew Stevens
7-10 Luca Brecel [11] v Noppon Saengkham
10-7 John Higgins [6] v Thepchaiya Un-Nooh

10-6 Zhao Xintong [7] v Jamie Clarke WAL
9-10 Shaun Murphy [10] v Stephen Maguire
10-3 Mark Allen [15] v Scott Donaldson
10-7 Ronnie O'Sullivan [2] v David Gilbert

[MrRottweiler]

Come on John!

My favourite time of the year has arrived. Hours and hours of snooker coverage every day for the next few weeks 😊

I've just bought a HDD recorder (Panasonic DMR-EX97) so can record every match.

[JimMalone]

This season felt like finally kind of a change is coming with success of younger or newer players like Zhao Xintong, Luca Brecel or Hossein Vafaei and occasional good runs from others. Actually this year when I think about who I’d pick to be world champion I don’t really find a name, cause there are reasons against any of them. On the other hand this means I can imagine so many different people as world champions as rarely before, though I suspect that in the end it will be a rather familiar name.

The more spread success probably automatically also leads to me quite liking the draw. It seems pretty even all in all. There are many first rounders that could be close already.

First quarter:
Mark Selby – Jamie Jones
Yan Bingtao – Chris Wakelin
Barry Hawkins – Jackson Page
Mark Williams – Michael White

Mark Selby obviously takes the traditional place of the defending champion, which he is for the fourth time already. With his general abilities and his “Palmares” Selby has the same status as John Higgins and Ronnie O’Sullivan: he is always one of the favourites. But Selby has experienced the worst season since his early days as a pro. If he doesn’t win the title in Sheffield it will be his first season without a title since 2010/11. On one hand the same was true when Selby entered the World Championship in 2014 and 2016 and both times he captured the big title. But in both years Selby was playing much better than in this one, where he only reached the semifinal at the Grand Prix.
I won’t exclude the possibility that Selby fights through the first two rounds and finds new confidence and his opponents will once again find out that he is very tough to beat at the later stage of the World Championship. But I think his poor play is a consequence of his self admitted mental problems and those struggles are among the toughest for players and therefore I don’t see Selby righten his ship this time.
In fact I can imagine that Selby exits already in round one against Jamie Jones. The Welshman isn’t the most consistent player, but he can play very well at a given day and usually especially the crucible inspires his best performances. In four starts at the World Championship he has reached the second round three times, once even reaching the quarterfinal and so has a 4-4-record there.

Whoever of Selby or Jones wins I think he is likely to play Yan Bingtao in the second round. It’s true that the Chinese didn’t quite play as well as some expected him after his triumph at the 2021 Masters, but bear in mind he is still only 22 years old and to me the Masters success was rather an outlier of the small, but certain steps I see Yan making all the time. I was shocked by his 0-9 defeat against Zhao Xintong in the German Masters final and I’m a little concerned for him that he still is only able to hang on only narrowly at the end of the Top 16, but most of the time he wins a couple of matches at the tournaments and with his fine all-around game I still think longer matches should suit him overall. So I expect him to beat Chris Wakelin and then maybe go on to reach his first quarterfinal at the crucible.

The other side here is the Welsh Section. Mark Williams opens his quest for a fourth World Title against compatriot Michael White. It’s worth noting that White beat Williams not only in their only Crucible meeting, but also in their sole other match in longer than Best-of-9-format at the 2019 UK Championship. I think White really has problems, when under pressure, but I feel that he will play better against someone he knows quite well like Williams and I can sense an upset here as well, especially since White had a strong run in the qualifiers and for the seeded players the first match at the World Championship often is not as easy.
Mark Williams is generally one of the hardest players to predict. If he finds some form and really enjoys playing he can beat anybody, but if things don’t go for him he will often find it easier to lose his focus than to put on a strong fight. So I can basically see every outcome for him in this tournament from a first round exit to a fourth crown.

At only 20 years Jackson Page will make his World Championship debut against old hand Barry Hawkins. Page gives me the feeling of being not afraid of anyone, but playing at the theatre of snooker dreams for the first time is still an overwhelming experience of everybody and Hawkins should have the upper hand here.

Barry Hawkins is a player, who many feel is overdue for a world title. Stephen Hendry once picked him as the best player never to win world champion and while I think there are better candidates for this title, the Hawk certainly is quite high on this list. The crucible usually is the place where Hawkins plays his best snooker, but his best time there seems to be over. After reaching the quarterfinal six times in a row, thereof five times the semifinals, he lost in the second round the last three years. Was Hawkins’ 2018 semifinal loss the end of his title hopes the same way the 1994 final was for Jimmy White after such a tremendous series or does he still have the one good run in him? I have a feeling Hawkins has one last hurrah in him. When he reached the semifinal of the UK Championship this year, it seemed that this could be Barrys one big trophy, but he was blown off the table by Zhao Xintong. I kinda like Hawkins’ draw. I think he can reach the semifinal in this quarter and once at that stage much is possible of course.

Semifinal pick: Barry Hawkins


Second quarter:
Kyren Wilson – Ding Junhui
Stuart Bingham – Lyu Haotian
Anthony McGill – Liam Highfield
Judd Trump – Hossein Vafaei

Ding Junhui is one of the players I would put ahead of Hawkins as best player without World title. For only the second time in recent years Ding had to qualify for the World Championship after falling out of the Top 16. The first time in 2016 the Chinese followed this by reaching his sole World Final. So does this mean Ding will go on a terrific run again? As much as I would love this I doubt it a bit. Contrary to 2016 Ding’s form now has gone continually down over two or three years and worse, he seems to have lost interest in Snooker a bit. He has played quite rarely this season and when he was on the start he mostly wasn’t successful. Still Ding sure was an opponent every seed wanted to avoid and Kyren Wilson won’t be lucky, especially since Ding had one of his rare feelings of success this season, when he beat Wilson 5-3 at the Turkish Masters. Wilson beat Ding shortly after at the Gibraltar Open, but obviously none of those tournaments compares to the World Championship.

Wilson vs. Ding is definitely the marquee match of the first round and I can see go it in either direction. Wilson has replaced Hawkins as the player who will always go deep at the Crucible, but of course he hasn’t faced such a big name in the opening round. Over the last couple of years Wilson has been one of the more consistent players and established himself in the Top 10. But this season he hasn’t been nearly as consistent as the year before and also a run of six crucible quarterfinals in a row like Wilson has, has to end at some point. So while I myself actually think that Wilson still is a bit underrated on this forum I could imagine that Ding will the man to end it.

If it’s not Ding it might be Stuart Bingham? He opens against Lyu Haotian, who was on the losing end of a very one-sided affair last year against Mark Allen. I once thought Lyu could be one of the very successful Chinese players along with Yan, Zhou and Zhao, but over the last few years he seems to have made almost no progress. And while Bingham hasn’t played too well over the course of this season he should be favourite here with his experience.
If Bingham wins it would be a nice second rounder against Ding or Wilson regardless and I’d be pretty sure it should be a close contest. Bingham beat Ding last year in round one 10-9 and also their other encounter at the crucible went the full distance with Ding winning 13-12 in 2011. Wilson won the only duel with Bingham in Sheffield 13-10 in 2017.

Judd Trump is the guy to whom the second half of this section belongs seeding-wise. By the high standard of his two previous seasons this one was a bit quieter. But this is only natural. You can’t play on the highest level continuous for a very long time I think therefore Snooker is mentally too demanding. And like Selby about 2018 or 2019 Trump seems a bit burnt out now. But he lately found at least a bit increase of form and he might also get a boost knowing this is the last tournament for quite a time and he can find time to relax afterwards.
When I’m trying to pick a world champion I rarely look for the best player of the season. Cause that one usually doesn’t also win the big thing. I think over the last 10 years the only time the most dominant player of the season also became World Champion was Selby in 2017. I rather look for someone who enjoyed a good season with a few good runs and one or maybe, especially since there are so many tournaments nowadays, two titles. And Trump would fit this criteria. Trump has mostly played well at the crucible, but especially since he build up a better shot selection and all around game – and added a B game if you like to call it this way.
He opens against a player, who doesn’t really have this in Hossein Vafaei, but who can play really inspired snooker for the odd match and put together a strong run. However this will be the Iranians debut at the World Championship as well and I feel over the Best-of-19-distance Trump will be too strong for him.

Anthony McGill, who beat Ronnie O’Sullivan last year and made the semifinal in 2020, would likely be Trump’s second opponent. I would make the Scotsman the clear favourite against Liam Highfield and could imagine another good run for him, though I don’t really include him among those people, ready to lift the trophy this year. A quarterfinal between either Trump or McGill and either Wilson, Ding or Bingham should be one to look forward to.

Semifinal pick: Judd Trump

Third quarter:
Neil Robertson – Ashley Hugill
Jack Lisowski – Matthew Stevens
Luca Brecel – Noppon Saengkham
John Higgins – Thepchaiya Un-Nooh


Neil Robertson is by rational thinking the top favourite of this years edition. He was the best player of the season, he has quite a complete game and you would expect that at some point he will add a second World title to his resume. And actually a few weeks ago I would probably have picked him to do it this year. But then he won the Tour Championship with an improbable comeback in the final. And aside from the fact that Robertson now is this season’s best player, which as I pointed out earlier seldom is the last man standing at the Crucible the Aussie now has a much bigger statistic hurdle to overcome.
It’s already tough to win to ranking events in a row, cause it’s really hard to keep form and focus on highest level for a long time and the density in Snooker is pretty high. But it is even harder to win the World Championship after having already won the last tournament before. Mark Selby was the only one in recent times to achieve this tremendous feat in recent times in 2017. The last player before him to do so was John Higgins in 1998!

On the bright side I think Robertson has the easiest early path of any top contender this year. I might do him wrong, but in my eyes Ashley Hugill is the weakest (or at least one of the weakest) qualifiers this year. The winner of Jack Lisowski – Matthew Stevens would be next for Robertson and I also think this is on paper as easy as it gets in the second round.
Robertson – Lisowski actually would be a repeat of last year’s second round at the Crucible. This was one of Lisowski’s best matches I’ve seen, but he still lost 9-13. I just think that over this long format Lisowski usually will give a well-balanced top player like Robertson to many chances. Lisowski would have to make very little mistakes and the longer the match the harder to do. As for Stevens, it’s nice to see him in Sheffield again, but the days where he could damage are gone I think. The last time the runner-up of 2000 and 2005 went further than the second round was in 2012.

John Higgins could be Robertsons opponent in the quarterfinal and I guess most fans would love to see this after their recent encounter in the final of the Tour Championship. This was actually the second – and bigger – heartbreaker Higgins received this season from the hands of the Australian, after the Scotsman already looked the winner in their final of the English Open as well. In the crucible they actually met only once, with Higgins winning 13-10 in the 2019 quarterfinal. Given this years results between those two mentally it seems hard to see how Higgins would win it this time, but sports loves to write special stories and this year I can’t see a better story than Higgins adding a fifth World Title after

• Losing his last three World finals
• Losing seven of his last eight finals
• After dropping fifty pounds before this season to finally find physical form

At least the last thing really should help Higgins as I think this definitely was an issue at the World Championship at the last few years. Especially in the 2019 final you could see how he was simple over the limit after hard two weeks.
Despite his “mental scars” from the Tour Championship as he worded it, I like Higgins’ chances against Thepchaiya Un-Nooh, a player who is great, when in flow, but who is tactical not as astute.

One of the most interesting first rounders to me is Luca Brecel vs. Noppon Saengkham. The Belgian is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get from him. He is one of the players who knows only attack. When the balls keep falling he can put together a good run as he has shown in the odd event. But when he misses, which happens of course over the long format, he can get punished. This is a reason that Brecel never won a match at the crucible. This year might be his best chance so far, since he is overall playing better than ever and only in Gary Wilson in 2019 had another opponent as beatable as Saengkham (Brecel lost 9-10), but I think quite high of Saengkham. He is a pretty good all around player and a fighter. If Brecel doesn’t steamroll him with his attack I guess the match will stay close and I could see the Thai having more will and energy to win it.

Saengkham and Brecel could give Higgins a good fight, but I would make the Scotsman the favourite against them probably. Higgins' mentality has to be in question at this point, but he has won hard fights before.

Of this section I have a hard time to see another semifinalist than either Robertson or Higgins.

Semifinal pick: John Higgins

Fourth quarter:
Zhao Xintong – Jamie Clarke
Shaun Murphy – Stephen Maguire
Mark Allen – Scott Donaldson
Ronnie O’Sullivan – David Gilbert

Zhao Xintong is probably the man whose performance I’m looking forward the most to. I was really extremely surprised by the Chinese’s development this year and I’m very, very curious how he will fare at the biggest stage. The new Zhao, cause you can’t compare him to the guy he was before this year, played only two really long matches, his both ranking finals this season, and won them in convincing fashion. Though in both he didn’t have to face one of the biggest names. He’ll play Jamie Clarke first, who did one thing Zhao never achieved though – the Welshman has already won a match at the crucible.
It also will be interesting if Zhao feels the pressure, cause expectations for him are quite high. If he beats Clarke, he could already meet last year’s runner-up Shaun Murphy in the second round.

Shaun Murphy himself starts with the biggest classic among this year’s first round matches as he will meet his arch enemy Stephen Maguire. There has always been an edge to this duel since the infamous chalk incident in 2004 and often the Scotsman, even in recent years, when he was mostly a shallow of his former self found a better way to use this fuel than Murphy. And while Maguire’s season was poor, Murphy’s was really dreadful by his standard, but actually quite similar to the one he had last year, when he made his fourth appearance in a crucible final, beating Yan, Trump and Wilson on his way.
But however this duel is really special and it’s really tough to pick a winner here. Whoever goes one round further has a huge advantage in experience, but I would make neither Murphy nor Maguire the automatic favourite against Zhao. Actually I think this half-section is wide open and nobody would be a surprise quarterfinalist here aside from Clarke.
This is not true for the other half-section.

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the big name here and he enjoyed a pretty good season as well, actually better than I would have thought before and not dissimilar to the seasons when he went on to lift the world trophy. As in most of those years he won a title and had some other runs to finals and semifinals. So will he really tie Stephen Hendry with 7 World Titles this year? I think O’Sullivan has one of the tougher first round opponents with David Gilbert. They met once at the crucible and O’Sullivan won this one 10-7 in 2016, but I think Gilbert has become a better player since. He also is somebody, whose game I like a lot and he certainly could give Ronnie a tough challenge here, if and that’s usually the decisive point with Gilbert, if his nerves hold up.

In the second round O’Sullivan could meet Mark Allen, who beat him here in 2009, which still is the only year Allen made it to the one table set-up in the Crucible. The man from Northern Ireland is one of the players who isn’t awestruck when facing O’Sullivan, whom he beat several times and therefore I would like to see this second rounder, if O’Sullivan as expected beats Gilbert, as I don’t think Scott Donaldson would be a match for Ronnie. Allen was one of the eight players featuring at the Tour Championship, but actually I think his season wasn’t as good as the numbers say and much is varnished by his win of the Northern Ireland Open. He played inspired Snooker there, but his only other good run was at the German Masters.
However if Ronnie makes the quarterfinals here he could have an opponent he usually likes to play as Murphy or Maguire or it would be a wild match-up against Zhao Xintong, in which I’d be curious how the young Chinese would play the myth of O’Sullivan on the biggest stage Snooker knows.

I really have a hard time to pick a player out of this section somehow. O'Sullivan would be the obvious choice, but I can imagine a defeat of him in the first two rounds against Gilbert or Allen or in round three against Zhao.

Semifinal pick: Mark Allen

[JimMalone]

My first round guesses:

8-10 Mark Selby [1] v Jamie Jones
10-7 Yan Bingtao [16] v Chris Wakelin
10-5 Barry Hawkins [9] v Jackson Page
10-9 Mark Williams [8] v Michael White

8-10 Kyren Wilson [5] v Ding Junhui
10-5 Stuart Bingham [12] v Lyu Haotian
10-7 Anthony McGill [13] v Liam Highfield
10-9 Judd Trump [4] v Hossen Vafaei

10-3 Neil Robertson [3] v Ashley Hugill
8-10 Jack Lisowski [14] v Matthew Stevens
7-10 Luca Brecel [11] v Noppon Saengkham
10-6 John Higgins [6] v Thepchaiya Un-Nooh

10-6 Zhao Xintong [7] v Jamie Clarke
9-10 Shaun Murphy [10] v Stephen Maguire
10-5 Mark Allen [15] v Scott Donaldson
10-8 Ronnie O'Sullivan [2] v David Gilbert

[kligu]

I have never been good at this but it is fun each time (the same is true for the game of snooker itself). So here I go:

10-7 Mark Selby [1] v Jamie Jones
8-10 Yan Bingtao [16] v Chris Wakelin
10-3 Barry Hawkins [9] v Jackson Page
10-5 Mark Williams [8] v Michael White

10-9 Kyren Wilson [5] v Ding Junhui
10-4 Stuart Bingham [12] v Lyu Haotian
10-6 Anthony McGill [13] v Liam Highfield
10-3 Judd Trump [4] v Hossen Vafaei

10-1 Neil Robertson [3] v Ashley Hugill
10-7 Jack Lisowski [14] v Matthew Stevens
10-8 Luca Brecel [11] v Noppon Saengkham
10-6 John Higgins [6] v Thepchaiya Un-Nooh

8-10 Zhao Xintong [7] v Jamie Clarke
9-10 Shaun Murphy [10] v Stephen Maguire
7-10 Mark Allen [15] v Scott Donaldson
8-10 Ronnie O'Sullivan [2] v David Gilbert

[itsnoteasy]

No seeds will go from the first quarter. They could all go in the second but that would unreal. Jack and Luca, from the third quarter, who knows but will probably get through with ease as will Higgins and Robertson. Fourth quarter Murphy and Allen will go, although I admit that's a heart over head prediction.

[trains]

watching on bet365 with the tv on standby , have to say its bliss not being exposed to any of the tired old farts on the bbc.

[DeanH]

watching on bet365 with the tv on standby , have to say its bliss not being exposed to any of the tired old farts on the bbc.

Shaun Murphy - "tired old fart"?


I bounced over to Eurosport 1 as soon as intros finished