Shanghai Masters 2012 - Day 1

Nugget takes a good start

The first day of this year's Shanghai Masters tournament brought with it good news for the qualifiers, but an enormous bag of bad news for the wild-cards, for only one of them prevailed the cue-crossings.

Early in the morning (on the continent that is) legend Steve Davis was getting a huge "Wow" from the Chinese crowd that was witnessing "The Nugget" taking on one of their local heroes Zhu Yinghui. 

And the "wow" continued most of the match, for Davis was the one who imposed his cue-style over a disarmed opponent.

Two breaks of 34 and 27 were enough for Steve to win the first frame, while runs of 77, 69 and 39 were putting him 4-0 in front as the mid-session interval was kicking off.

A quarter of an hour later the players returned into the arena and it was easy to see that Davis had lost some of that spark when he missed an easy read to the left middle pocket. Still he didn't let his guard down and although Yinghui managed to pull back a frame, the six-time world champion caught the next one for a 5-1 victory.

At a near table Lu Haotian, a player who's just 14 years old, but has a huge hunger for winning, managed to end up on a tight 5-4 scoreline with the Hong Kong-man Marco Fu, who despite a 3-0 perfect start and his efforts to overcome a younger opponent failed to do the job.

Another close battle was the one held between Robert Milkins and China's Zhou Yuelong, now Robert having to face the Shanghai Masters champion from two years ago, Ali Carter in the next round, while "The Kid" Jamie Jones had  no trouble whatsoever to beat Lu Ning 5-2 and secure himself a spot in the next round where he's facing "Johnny" Higgins.

Williams storms in to win his first match

And if yesterday I was mentioning some cool snooker player also known to the large public under the name of Mark Williams, today the Welshman showed his face on the green baize and did a pretty good job in kicking off Mark Davis by an impressive 5-1 scoreline.

Long story short, after losing the opening frame to Davis "The Welsh potting machine" won the next five with runs of 53, 67 and 88 and he's now full of confidence to do a similar job in his next match.

Mark King and Ryan Day took care of sending home two more wild-cards, Day performing a perfect 5-0 whitewash against Wang Yuchen, while King beat Zhao Xintong by 5-3.

But if Ryan Days earned his chance to play at least one more match, for his fellow country-man Matthew Stevens things went in a totally different direction as he got beat 5-2 by Joe Perry in a top-quality match that saw two century breaks (103, 131) being hit from both sides.

Tomorrow the action continues with:

7.30am
9) Mark Selby v Jamie Cope
16) Stephen Maguire v Peter Ebdon
6) Fergal O'Brien v Chen Feilong
7) Jimmy Robertson v Jin Long

12.30pm
11) Ding Junhui v Mark King
12) Shaun Murphy v Dominic Dale
23) Mark Allen v Lu Haotian
15) Allister Carter v Rob Milkins
*all hours are UK time

 TV coverage:
07:30 - 11:45 British EuroSport
07:30 - 10:30 British EuroSport 2
12:30 - 14:00 British EuroSport
12:30 - 15:30 British EuroSport 2
19:00 - 22:00 British EuroSport 2