The brilliant Waterfront Hall takes centre stage for the Northern Ireland Open, which starts on Sunday. James Cooper has looked at the held over ties along with the confirmed second-round matches and has found three bets.
Snooker betting tips: Northern Ireland Open
1pt Ding Junhui -1.5 frames v Michael White at 4/5 (Sky Bet, bet365)
1pt Joe O’Connor to beat Luca Brecel at 21/10 (BetVictor, William Hill)
1pt Andy Hicks to beat Jimmy Robertson at 19/5 (Unibet)
While I understand the logistics regarding held over matches, it does leave the first day a little light on betting opportunities given the one-sided nature of half of those ties.
That said, there’s still value to be had early in Belfast, with the first overpriced outcome coming in the already decided second-round clash between DING JUNHUI and Michael White (Tuesday).
The pandemic clearly affected Ding more than most with travel between China and the UK difficult and that seemed to hinder him when it came to sorting out his playing schedule.
I’ve long viewed Ding as something of an enigma and as a punter, he remains a very tricky player to get a handle on, chiefly as there’s a chasm between his best and worst displays. When the going is good, though, you can probably count on one hand superior exponents of cue-ball control in the history of the game than Ding and the early evidence of this season is that he is back firing on all cylinders.
Four wins from five and 16 fifty-plus breaks from 27 frames this term is a more-than-acceptable return for Ding and a brace of 4-1 victories against Joe Perry and Ali Carter (superior opponents to Michael White according to my numbers) augurs well for his prospects of covering the -1.5 handicap available at 4/5 with a couple of firms.
A run to the Championship League semi-final and three wins out of five is a solid return for White but he hasn’t played anyone of the calibre of this opponent across that quintet of matches and while it would be wrong to compare a short-length match like this with a last-32 tie at the Crucible, the last time White played someone of Ding’s class, he was brushed aside 10-3 by Mark Williams at Sheffield.
When running the numbers on this best-of-seven, it’s a 4/11 v 11/4 contest with me, and regarding the handicap, Ding comes out at 58% to cover -1.5 frames.
We are not talking about a huge edge here, but there is one nonetheless so that is bet number one ticked off.
The second wager I like the look of is JOE O'CONNOR to cause a minor upset against Luca Brecel in one of the held over matches (Sunday, 2000 BST).
Championship League victory was the perfect reappearance for Brecel but we haven’t seen a lot of him since, a routine win over Andy Lee preceding defeats against Wu Yize and Graeme Dott.
2021/22 was undeniably a breakthrough season for the highly-touted Belgian, displaying class in spades to recover from UK Championship final defeat to land the Scottish equivalent of this a week later, but as mentioned earlier regarding Ding, Brecel is also more liable than most to throw in a shocker.
In O’Connor, he meets a player who is quietly on the up and while Brecel is a slightly different proposition to Alexander Ursenbacher and Chris Wakelin, victories over that pair in recent weeks should give O’Connor plenty of belief that his game is in a pretty good spot.
As far as the match probabilities are concerned, this is 0.65 v 0.35 encounter so around 8/15 Brecel v 15/8 O’Connor. With that in mind, any price of 2/1-plus for the Leicester potter represents a viable betting proposition.
The final bet comes in the Jimmy Robertson v ANDY HICKS tie, with the veteran too big at 19/5 to land this short-format match (Monday, 1900).
Having nearly dropped off the tour in 2020/21, Robertson enjoyed the beat season of his career last term, recording a couple of semi-final appearances in the British Open and World Grand Prix respectively and banking the best part of £125,000 in the process.
He’s continued the good work this time around and already has a 5-2 over Hicks to his name in the European Masters. It was 2-2 at the interval in that match though and Hicks remains an underrated player when in the balls.
Indeed, Hicks compiled a brace of centuries when giving John Higgins a scare in the British Open and confirmed he’s still capable of useful form when dispatching Zhang Anda 4-1 to qualify for this.
The +2.5 handicap is one way to play this but the biggest expected value according to my numbers comes in the 19/5 match price as I am 100/30 on Hicks reaching four frames first.
Posted at 1850 BST on 15/10/22
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