The snooker bandwagon rolls on with Scottish Qualifiers already underway.
When assessing one-sided matches for handicap purposes, a sometimes-overlooked trait is attitude, particularly when competitors down the rankings are used to losing in an era of flat draws.
Mink backed to cover handicap
Match prices of 1-14 against 8-1 in this best-of-seven frames contest confirm that MINK NUTCHARUT is right up against it taking on her talented Chinese opponent Xu Si but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the 2022 Women’s Snooker Champion has it in her to take the requisite two frames required to land the +2.5 frames wager.
Nutcharut surpassed pre-game expectations against Mohamed Ibrahim attempting to Qualify for The British Open, losing in a decider, and a 5-2 defeat against an in-form Chris Wakelin in a Wuhan prelim was probably a par result.
Heavy defeats against Cao Yupeng and Ryan Day followed but there were much more encouraging signs against Michael White last week, ultimately coming up 4-2 shy having looked set to go 3-2 up.
Opponent Xu Si has won five of his 11 non-championship league matches, a 5-4 win over Mark Selby the clear highlight it what has been a no-more than fair season return so far.
What has been notable though is that Si’s heavy scoring seems to have deserted him a touch and when looking at the numbers for this, Nutcharut would be around a 5/2 shot per frame, which makes her close to 45% when it comes to covering this cap.
On that basis, the general 11/8 available is acceptable.
Peng the play at tasty odds
The other match of interest is He Guoqiang against YISONG PENG and the suspicion is that it may pay to chance the outsider to spring another surprise at 11-4.
There’s been a lot of interest surrounding a talented batch of rookies this season, with Stan Moody bursting onto the scene in Belfast, but Guoqiang’s results have arguably been the best of the bunch so far.
A run to the quarter-final of the British Open was seriously impressive and he took several good scalps en route to the last 16 of the English and Wuhan equivalents.
Standards have dipped a tad since, losing to Peng in rather meek fashion 4-1 in a match littered with errors for Guoqiang.
The match prices for that clash were 1-5 against 3-1 and the layers haven’t reacted too much to that reversal, with 1-4 versus 11-4 chalked up this time.
Peng has his limitations and certainly wouldn’t be as proficient in the balls as Guoqiang but his safety game is pretty solid and if he can rein his opponent in, another scrappy match would certainly be in his favour.
At this stage of their careers, I make this a 2-5 versus 5-2 match and the outright market looks the way to play this given the ceiling of Guoqiang’s ability is very much unknown
