The Malta Cup starts on the 4th February and will be a group format tournament. There are 2 wilcards from Malta, Alex Borg and Tony Drago and 2 other wildcards, Marco Fu and Dominic Dale.
Ronnie will not be entering this tournament and Joe Perry has taken his place.
The groups are shown below:
Click here for a larger view.
This isn't a ranking event but it will be shown live on Eurosport I believe. More information can be found here.
In a fine display of solid match snooker, Jonni Fulcher derailed the Borg Express finally ending his run of 25 straight wins in European Snooker. Borg had only three chances in the balls in the entire match, which he was unable to capitalize upon. Five chances in all were all that Fulcher needed to clintch the match with a very convincing 4-0 winning margin. He fired in breaks of 63, 64 and 69 striding his way to one of the best of his career wins.
This is Fulcher's first European Championships representing Switzerland, where he has lived for the past four years. Currently one of the top 10 ranked European Pool players he is showing that he's not constrained to the American disciplines and, with his roots in snooker, performances like this show that he's a force to be reckoned with on the European Snooker front.
This year the European Amature Snooker Championships are being held in Carlow, Republic of Ireland. The event got underway this Wednesday with a number of big names amateur and ex-professional names in the line up. Most notably Darren Morgen, Eugine Hughes playing in the Seniors. Alex Borg from Malta (Photo left - European champion for the last two years!), Bjorn Haneveer from Belgium, Yannick Poulin from France, Stefan Mazrocis from Holland, Michael White from Wales... The list goes on.
Snooker is spreading ever further and wider accross Europe, this year the list of countries taking part is as large as ever with players from 25 countries and 26 countries in all represented when including referees.
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Jersey, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Wales.
The format for the men's tournament is 8 groups of 8 players playing round robin with the top 4 going through to the last 32 knockout stage. For the Masters it is 4 groups of 8 with top 4 going through to the last 16 knockout stage and for the girls 4 groups of 6 with top 2 going through to the last 8 knockout stage.
The main news for the tournament can be found here. Live scoring can be found here.
We wish everyone a great tournament and I look forward to posting more about the progress of the tournament and perhaps my own progress as the days unfold.
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