PTC1 - Bet your house on these malformed insights!

There's lots of places you can find the draw for the first Players Tour Championship event of the 2012/2013 season, but this isn't one of them. To make sense of what I'm yammering about in this article, please consult Wikipedia here: Players Tour Championship 2012/2013 - Event 1

I'm looking forward to the PTCs this year and I expect that m'boy Graeme Dott should be able to do well in them again, which may be the key to his holding a Top-16 spot going into the next couple of revisions after a few rough results at the end of last season.

Kacper Filipiak: Won a frame against John Higgins. Once.

Photo by Monique Limbos

Running through the preliminary round draws, it looks like Reanne Evans is back in the mix but she didn't do too well in these events last season, but you gotta wish her well. It couldn't hurt to get a woman in the game who could compete with some of these dudes.

Poland's wonderkid Kacper Filipak shows up in Round 2 against Joe Swail hoping to get into the main rounds and win at least a match this time--I'm fairly sure Kacper was shut out of wins last season and didn't exactly snatch many frames against top players either (if you don't count the 70-0 frame over John Higgins in the World Cup that one time). The preliminary rounds are, as always, full of a few names you recognize and a few that you've never heard of. Arbitrarily, amongst these lot, I'm going to root for Scotland's Marc Davis to push all the way through to hopefully face Mark Davis in the final. I like to see the referees put in unusual situations ("Foul, Marc Davis, ninety-seven; Mark Davis, six and the frame, Marc Davis.")

Section 1 of the draw has a pretty good crop of players waiting to play the survivors of the preliminary round and I'd expect pretty much all of them to win their first matches--though Andrew Higginson sometimes looks like one of those players who can lose to anybody, despite slaying giants quite a bit more often than his own conquerors. Kurt Maflin still seems to be the only guy regularly carrying all of the hopes and dreams of Scandinavian snooker fans and he was playing well towards the end of last season, making it all the way to the last-16 in PTC12 where, in fact, Andrew Higginson ended up finishing him off. All in all, it should be Mark Selby's quarter if he can kick this season's current habit of not being constantly in the semis or better all the time.

In Section 2, I'm counting on Michael White to lose to Alan McManus, who will go on to lose to Dominic Dale, who will meet Xiao Guodong in the last-16, possibly losing. You can bet your house on that (don't). Section 3 has a potential last-64 match between the two recent ranking event winners Barry Hawkins and Ricky Walden. Andy Hicks is in this section of the draw as well and I keep hoping to see him back in the televised stages. But I'm sure the ever unpronounceable Thanawat Thiranpongpaiboon, who won the amateur under-21 world title held in my native Canada last year, will always pose a threat in these events.

Speaking of better your house on stuff, how about 4-0 Robert Milkins over Ben Judge in Section 4. Take my advice (don't [no, really, that's a good bet]).

Floyd Ziegler: On the pro tour for Canada! Soon. I think.

As a Canadian, I was going to be vociferously rooting for Floyd Ziegler who was drawn a tough challenge in Fergal O'Brien in his first pro tour match. Floyd was given the Americas nomination and is the first Canadian flag on the tour for quite some time, but he appears to have withdrawn from this first event. Maybe next time! Also in this section, Peter Ebdon and Rod Lawler have drawn one another in the first round, which should be the longest snooker match of all time, despite the short format.

Steve Davis faces Zhang Anda, most famous for pushing Stephen Hendry to a deciding frame in Round 1 of the 2010 Worlds, in Section 6 while Jimmy White and Tony Drago are schedule for a first-round shootout in Section 7.

Last, but of course not least, the Graeme Dott quarter--while I root for Dott over any other player, he'll have to meet and defeat Belgium's Luca Brecel right off the bat. Luca is fresh off a good World Championship campaign in which he had to win four Best-of-19 qualifying matches for the right to play at the Crucible for the first time. Whereas Graeme's Crucible campaign was considerably less momentous, putting in one of his worst career performances losing 10-1 to a sub-par Joe Perry.

As luck would have it, should Dott extinguish the fire of Luca Brecel, he will also have to survive a potential clash with the always-tough Ken Doherty, followed by a potential meeting with Joe Perry again! Or worse, the sneering Tom Ford who has inexplicably, and to my gross disappointment, defeated Graeme in their last two ranking event meetings. To top it all off, Graeme Dott's reward for meeting these challenges (which of course, he is totally capable) is probably a last-16 run-in with Judd Trump!

True, it's only a PTC and losing out even in the first round wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but Graeme is slipping down those rankings a little when you see what's happening at Matt's Fantastic Latest Projected Seedings at Pro Snooker Blog, and this is also the sort of series of victories that would help re-establish his confidence as being among the best (which of course, he is).

Haphazard Quarter-finalist Predictions:
(NOTE: Predicted results are made with my head, not with my heart--but generally speaking, it doesn't make them any more accurate)

• Mark Selby 
• Xiao Guodong 
• Shaun Murphy 
• Robert Milkins 
• Stephen Lee 
• Ryan Day 
• Jimmy White 
• Judd Trump

PREDICTED WINNER: Mark Selby

HOPE LEFT THAT GRAEME DOTT WILL WIN THIS EVENT: Not very much, even for a PTC. =(