Pag's Punts: International Championship Qualifying Day 1

Over the next four days there is a feast of snooker action taking place in Barnsley as the International Championship Qualifiers get underway. This tournament is played on the new flat structure, instead of the tiered one which the first two full ranking events of this year have been played under. That means that the matches played at Barnsley will be the Last 128 round, so 60 games in all will be played as the games of the defending champion and World champion (Ricky Walden and Stuart Bingham) and the two highest seeded Chinese players (Ding Junhui and Liang Wenbo) are held over to the venue in China, in a system that was announced last year.

The format sees 15 games a day on each of the four days, with 6 morning games (9.30am), 5 afternoon games (2.30pm) and 4 evening games (7.30pm) for these best-of-11 frame ties.

For those of you in and around Barnsley, entry is free to the Metrodome to watch the games great stars in action. To pick out a few of the big favourites in action, Mark Allen plays on Wednesday morning, Mark Williams on Wednesday afternoon and Mark Selby and Michael White are both in two of Wednesday's four evening games. Barry Hawkins, Robert Milkins and Ali Carter are all playing on Thursday morning, with Matthew Stevens, Marco Fu and Stephen Maguire on Thursday afternoon, while Shaun Murphy plays on Thursday evening. Friday night sees the appearance of Neil Robertson, and on Saturday John Higgins, Joe Perry and Judd Trump all enter proceedings.


With the sheer choice of matches, ex-pro Andrew Pagett has been able to pick a variety of bets out for readers this week, starting with the matches on Wednesday. Here is who Pagett is backing on day one of the International Qualifiers:

As you can see in the above picture Pagett has picked out a fivefold accumulator on Mark King  to beat Ian Burns (8/15), Irishman David Morris to beat Sanderson Lam (4/11), new Shanghai Masters champion Kyren Wilson to beat Malaysia's Thor Chuan Leong (1/5), Joe Swail to beat Allan Taylor (2/5) and finally, Alan McManus to win an All-Scottish affair with Ross Muir (2/9). 

As always Pagett has gone through the odds comparison site Oddschecker to find the best odds for the readers and as shown above, Bet365 are best price on this offering odds of just over 3/1 overall. All the best of luck if you follow Pagett on this selections and keep an eye on the blog as the former Crucible Qualifier will be providing a bet for each day of qualifying this week.