Shanghai Masters - Day 1

Defending Champion John Higgins is through after beating
Mike Dunn 5-1. Image: World Snookr

The first full ranking event for a good while got underway on Monday, with the majority of wildcard round games played out, plus a couple of first round ties.

It’s been well over a month since Marco Fu won the Australian Goldfields Open and since then, there’s been a few of European Tour events and a couple invitational events.

Mark Davis recently won both the Six-Reds World Championship in Bangkok and the General Cup, held in Hong Kong, beating Neil Robertson in the finals of both.


First Round Matches
Defending Champion John Higgins got off to an excellent start in retaining his title as he defeated Redcar’s Mike Dunn 5-1. Dunn could’ve quite easily won the first two frames but the both went the way of Higgins, but Dunn did take the third with a break of 74. A run of 100 helped Higgins to a 3-1 interval lead and he saw out the match, winning the next two, with a top run of 107.

Shaun Murphy is also through to the second round after squeezing past Yu Delu 5-4. Murphy has a tendency to get regularly involved in close matches and this was no exception. He did win the opening two frames with big breaks of 116 and 77 but he was pegged back as Yu kept up the break-building with runs of 80 and 72. The next four frames were shared, with Murphy never trailing and he had just enough to win a tense decider, with the Sale man knocking in a top run of 60 to secure the match.


Wildcard Round
As this event is run in the old structured format, the new agreement with four wildcard entries is not applicable. This means that a random selection of the eight qualifiers will have to win Wildcard matches to go any further.

There was only one upset in the wildcard round matches, as Joe Perry was defeated 5-3 by Wang Yuchen. Perry has had an excellent start to the season and was closing in on a return to the top 16, but Wang put pay to any chance of making up ground with the win, a break of 76 being the highlight of the match.

Elsewhere in the afternoon’s other Wildcard Round matches, Cao Yupeng came through a deciding frame to beat Zhou Yuelong, whilst Xiao Guodong whitewashed 13-year-ol Yuan Shijun, with a top break of 122.

Two of the evening session matches, also went all the distance, with Martin Gould and Dave Gilbert both prevailing through deciding frames. Gould actually fought back from 4-2 down too beat Zhao Xintong and will face Ricky Walden in the last 32. Gilbert was also push all the way, but managed to beat Fang Xiongman and will face Ding Junhui on Wednesday.

The other wildcard round match of the day, saw Ryan Day ease his way past 19-year-old Lu Ning 5-1, with a top run of 88. He’ll play Mark Allen on Wednesday evening.