Championship League: Late entry Selt wins second group

I think you have to see the small amounts of irony in the fact that it was only on Tuesday evening before the Wednesday morning start to group two, that Matt Selt got the call to ask if he could step into the group after the late withdrawal of Neil Robertson (Despite Selt not being close to first reserve, and this time there was enough notice for certain others to make it down). Two days and eight games later however, Matt Selt took the group two crown and booked his place in the winners group with group one winner Barry Hawkins. An odd statistic to come from Selt's run is that every single one of his games win or lose, barring his 3-1 loss to Michael Holt went to deciding frames.

From the rest of the group Judd Trump was the losing finalist to end four decent days at Crondon Park for him, while Marco Fu gratefully took the second chance handed to him by sneaking into fifth place of group one and narrowly surviving elimination, to make the semi-finals before losing to Judd. Ali Carter topped the group at the end of the round robin stages and looked on course for the final when leading Matt Selt 2-0, but Matt battled back to win the final three frames and the match 3-2.

The lucky man this time was Stuart Bingham who finished in fifth place of the group, narrowly avoiding elimination by winning just a couple of extra frames in his six matches. This means that Robert Milkins and Michael Holt were the two players that just fell short on frames won in the end and propped up the table in sixth and seventh to be eliminated. Here's everything that happened yesterday at the Championship League courtesy of the famous Annison notepad:

That's the Championship League over for a week and a half with group three beginning on Monday 19th January with Trump, Fu, Carter and Bingham being joined by Walden, Ryan Day and Mark Davis. What it's time for this coming week though of course is the Masters from the Alexandra Palace in London, and as always that will be an absolute cracker of an event.

I'll be back either later on tonight or tomorrow with my preview with the Masters, and it's going to be one of my biggest and toughest previews yet with so many good title candidates, but also so many tight calls for round one games that you could quite simply flip a coin on, so it'll be important for me to find the right angle on those.