The first round of the 2024 International Championship started yesterday as players aim at qualifying for the main venue. Here is the report by WST:

TRUMP SECURES INTERNATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP SLOT

World number one Judd Trump secured his place in the final stages of the International Championship after a thumping 6-1 win over Scotland’s Chris Totten in Sheffield. 

The Ace in the Pack has been in superb form so far this season, having picked up silverware at the Shanghai Masters, Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters and been runner-up at the inaugural Xi’an Grand Prix. 

Englishman Trump lost the opening frame this afternoon, but went on to compile breaks of 54, 66, 103, 60 and 71 on his way to six on the bounce and a comfortable win. Victory sees him progress to the final stages in Nanjing.

Mark Williams enjoyed an even more comprehensive outcome, as he whitewashed Pakistan’s Haris Tahir 6-0. 

The Welshman was runner-up to Trump in Saudi Arabia, but suffered the setback of a shock first round loss at the hands of Thor Chuan Leong to end the defence of his British Open title last week. He bounced straight back with breaks of 75, 100, 79 and 59 to beat Tahir without dropping a frame. 

Thepchaiya Un-Nooh earned his place with a 6-4 win over Lei Peifan. There was a dramatic moment in the second frame, when Un-Nooh missed the final black to spurn a maximum break. The Thai has history of missing the last ball on 140, having spurned a chance for £44,000 at the 2015 UK Championship.

China’s Wu Yize won the last three frames to defeat Wang Yuchen 6-4, while Anthony Hamilton inflicted a 6-0 whitewash on Jimmy White. 

All the detailed results are on snooker.org (of course!)

Once again this report overlooks quite a number of matches, notably all the matches played in the evening.

There were some notable results in that evening session:

• Ben Mertens got the better of Graeme Dott by 6-4 in an extremely hard fought match that had started in the afternoon and was pulled off at 5-4 to Ben. Dott had lead 4-2 in that match.
• Haydon Pinhey, who is in his first year as a pro, beat Stephen Maguire by 6-4.
• Dean Young, twenty-two years old, beat the very experienced Tian Pengfei by 6-5. Dean was 5-1 ahead in that match. Tian then won four consecutive frames. He had the momentum. But Dean found something from somewhere and took the decider with a break of 94, the highest break of the match.
• Xu Si won a strange match against Ahmed Elsayed. Ahmed led by 5-1, with a highest break of 51. Xu Si appeared to be struggling badly and was making a lot of mistakes, attracting the attention of the usual “Chinese players are fixers” brigade on twitter. But from 5-1 down he came back to 5-4. At that point the match was pulled off. When they resumed, Xu quickly got the two frames he need for victory. Whilst all the frames won by Elsayed were close frames, the ones won by XU Si were one-sided. It was all a bit bizarre.

In other news …

Ronnie’s last book, “Unbreakable”, is now available in “paperback” edition. Ronnie was on various media promoting it. Check Kalacs’ comments for the links. He appeared to be well and positive in these interviews. On thing he stated is that there are now a lot of excellent very young players, which is true. As we know this wasn’t his opinion a few years back. But I believe it’s true, they are better now than then, notably because of the “injection” of more very good young Chinese players and mainland Europe players with “more flair” than the UK youngsters.