German Masters qualifying. Vladimir Sinitsin’s prediction

German Masters starts on December, 17. There are 128 players who will play two rounds in four days to figure out 32 to play in Berlin in February. There will be 24 games in three sessions each day. 16 last games of the first round and eight games of the second round will be played on the third day. All the games are played until five wins.

Top players can meet each other only in 1/8. Yet all the pairs have obvious favourites. Can we bet on someone? The most solid players are Mark Selby and Neil Robertson. They always play safely. The second group consists of strong players who are on fire this season – John Higgins, Shaun Murphy and Mark Allen. We can add here Marko Fu, Michael White, Stewart Bingham and Liang Wenbo. The last two lost  their semifinals in Gibraltar, but played very solid. And Wenbo also played in the final of UK Championship.

Other players from Top 16 play inconsistently, but they surely can pass through the first round. Barry Hawkins and Judd Trump are in bad form, Ricky Walden is busy with personal questions, Joe Perry plays with carelessness like his friend Mark Williams. It’s too dangerous to bet on Ding Junhui with his all-fired results. It will be the first game of Ronnie O’Sullivan in this season and I wonder what he can show us. He must defeat Hamza Akbar, losing only one or two frames. His second competitor must be Stuart Carrington who can also win just one, two or maybe three frames against O’Sullivan. Ronnie will try to be fully fit at London Masters. He’ve got to the first group of League Championship to gain more practice. He will get a good company there: Higgins, Williams, Walden, Hawkins, Milkins and Day.

There are solid players from 17-32 positions of ratings with high motivation to make it to the Top 16: Stephen Maguire (but I’ll not bet on him), Kyren Wilson (plays really good), Martin Gould, Matthew Selt, David Gilbert, Anthony McGill, Mark Davis, Allister Carter, Micheal Holt, Graeme Dott and Peter Ebdon.

The odds on favourites are relevant. We shouldn’t make an accumulator of three or four games with the odds like 1.17 or 1.25 – it’s too low. There are just three bets with the odds higher than 1.50 on the first day. So I will take two of them with addition to make them more juicy.