Congratulations Mark Allen
International Championship 2018 Winner
Here is the report on Worldsnooker:
Mark Allen defeated Neil Robertson 10-5 to win the International Championship and claim the £175,000 top prize in Daqing.
The Pistol has enjoyed a successful International Championship record over the years and was making his third appearance in the final. He was runner-up to Mark Selby last year, suffering a narrow 10-7 defeat in the showpiece tie.
Northern Irishman Allen secured the biggest win of his career earlier this year, when he defeated Kyren Wilson 10-7 in the final of the Masters at Alexandra Palace. However, his last silverware in ranking competition before this week came at the 2016 Players Championship.
Robertson remains on 14 ranking event titles from his career after losing out in what was his 22ndappearance in a ranking final.
A dominant afternoon session did most of the damage for Allen, as he established a 7-2 advantage. Allen achieved that lead by showcasing his fine break building form, which has seen him compile 14 centuries this week. Three of those came in that opening session with runs of 108, 103 and 119.
Australia’s Robertson wasn’t going to go down without a fight and flew out of the blocks in the evening. He fired in breaks of 84 and 121 to claim the first two frames and reduce his arrears to 7-4.
Allen crucially halted the Robertson resurgence in the 12th frame to make it 8-4 and a century run of 101 saw him move to the verge of victory at 9-4.
The high standard continued as Robertson composed a break of 113 to keep his hopes alive. However, it was Allen who took the next to emerge a 10-5 victor.
“This is what I want to do. I want to win tournaments and I want to win big events,” said Allen.”It is not easy to win tournaments these days, especially with so many good players, but I’ve played really well all week. There wasn’t many times where I struggled, only really getting over the line in the final because of the pressure.
“I think I was very close to the form from winning the Masters. In patches I actually played better, the first session of the final in particular.
“It is hard. There is only one winner after every tournament and there are 127 that go home very disappointed. I appreciate how hard it is to win these events, so I am not going to get carried away.”
Robertson admitted that he was defeated by the better player on the day, but wasn’t downbeat about his own form this week.
Robertson said: “I was incredibly confident going in. I know in finals it is going to take someone playing there best to beat me and Mark was certainly at his best today.
“The conditions have been a scorer’s paradise. When the top players have been in they haven’t been missing. It was going to take something really special to win this trophy. The standard required was very high.”
There is not much to add to this. Mark Allen played superbly all week and carried this form in the final. I was expecting a closer match, but the first session was very one-sided. I’m a bit surprised by Neil Robertson quotes about his confidence though. He played better this week than he has done in a very long time but still…
The draw and schedule for the group stage of the ManBetX Champion of Champions is now complete with the tournament set to break off at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena on Monday.
When you use this camera, your eye is behind the little rectangle that you see on the top right part of the body as pictured. The light that will “impress” the film though, is admitted through the round lens in the middle. So what your eye sees isn’t exactly the same as what the lens “sees” and captures. The consequence of this is that you might have unwanted elements near the border of the picture, that you didn’t see in the viewfinder, but the lens “saw”, or, on the contrary, have elements partially “cut” from the picture whilst you were seeing them as a whole in the viewfinder. The photography technology answer to the problem is the reflex camera where you aim at your subject directly through the lens – via a mirror – which allows you to see exactly the same image as the lens, but at the cost of additional weight and noise. How does this apply to snooker? Well, imagine that the tip could see; it’s at the end of the cue, it’s the part that needs to hit the ball as accurately as possible. That would be ideal… Unfortunately the player has two eyes and neither is at the same place as the tip. Moreover, humans usually have a dominant eye. It’s not difficult to know which of your eyes is the dominant one: just look at a not too distant object, with both eyes, then close one eye. Usually what you see will “shift”, and the shift will be more pronounced with one eye than with the other. The eye causing the less shift is your dominant one, the one that primarily determines which image your brain receives. So a player needs to learn how to align so that what they see when aiming is as close as possible to what the hypothetical “eye in the tip” would see, taking into account which of their eye is dominant and how their stance might create a parallax effect. Achieving this is the main goal of the Sightright method, and correctly applied it can only work. However “undoing” habits that are ingrained since childhood, and reconstructing new habits isn’t easy and doesn’t come quick especially if you’re a player for 30 years or more. This is not instant miracle method.
Jack Lisowski overcame close friend Judd Trump 6-2 to reach the semi-finals of the International Championship in Daqing.
Mark Allen put on a sublime display to thrash Ali Carter 6-0 and clinch his place in the last four.
Neil Robertson produced one of the best performances of the season so far to come from behind and beat world number one Mark Selby 6-4 in their quarter-final clash at the International Championship.
Matthew Stevens reached his first ranking semi-final since the 2013 Wuxi Classic by beating Martin O’Donnell 6-5.
Ronnie O'Sullivan 