Ali Carter has made his second maximum today as he thrashed Chinese youngster Wang Yuchen 5-0. Not only that, young Scot and former captain of the Scottish under 16’s team Ross Muir (above) made his first maximum break on the same day in frame 3, as he beat Brazilian Itaro Santos 5-2.
This is before when snooker players seem to have been given the bonus challenge to wait patiently for the draw for the German Masters Qualifying ties in Barnsley (not quite in Germany but there you go) less than 24 hours before they play their matches. Oh joy. And did the players love that?
Anyway, after a lot of them got to Barnsley on time an interesting number of victories happened there. John Astley got past Jimmy Robertson 5-1; Boonyait Keattikun got his first win as a pro under his belt by beating Scott Donaldson 5-3 and prodigy Zhao Xintong proving his worth yet again by beating higher seed Li Hang 5-3. Oh, and Mike Dunn got quite cross over Zhang Yong’s celebrations after his number of successive flukes won him the decider.
Ali Carter had not scored a 147 since the 2008 World Snooker Championships (below), where he received a standing ovation at the Crucible. He showed how dominant his form today – not only a whitewash but the points total of that match was 490-10 to the 37-year-old, which must be a record in the best-of-9 format surely!? Then on the other table, the glove-wearing 21-year-old Muir will now share the prize pot of £1,000 by hitting the 126th maximum in snooker history. This is only the second instance where two professional maximum’s happened in one day – Matthew Stevens and Ding Junhui hit their perfect breaks on 15 December 2011 at the FFB Snooker Open against Michael Wasley and Brandon Winstone respectively.
The next round of the German Masters starts this evening, with Ronnie O’Sullivan after his scare against Darryl Hill taking on Gary Wilson; Martin Gould looking to defend his first ranking title against Craig Steadman and; lastly the match of the evening – Noppon Saengkham vs. Stephen Maguire. Noppon looks like a Maguire’s bogey player so far, as the Thai has a 3-1 winning head-to-head record. Noppon is always a player who has the ability to be in the Top 64 but was dogged by successive losses against other top players. We will have to wait and find out!
