Zhang Anda and Elliot Slessor completed the last-eight lineup of Championship League Snooker in Leicester on Tuesday.
Both players emerged from their Stage Two groups with unbeaten records of two victories and a draw.
Zhang recovered from a slow start and a 2-2 draw with Jimmy Robertson to comfortably secure his passage through with back-to-back 3-0 defeats over Cheung Ka Wai and Jack Lisowski.
It was a similar situation for Slessor, who could only muster a tie with Dean Young but bounced back with a brace of 3-1 wins against Jackson Page and Xu Si.
Tuesday, July 14
Group G Results
Cheung Ka Wai 3-0 Jack Lisowski
Zhang Anda 2-2 Jimmy Robertson
Zhang Anda 3-0 Cheung Ka Wai
Jack Lisowski 3-0 Jimmy Robertson
Jimmy Robertson 3-0 Cheung Ka Wai
Zhang Anda 3-0 Jack Lisowski
Group G Table
1. Zhang Anda – 7 points
2. Jimmy Robertson – 4 points
3. Cheung Ka Wai – 3 points
4. Jack Lisowski – 3 points
Click here for more information about the tournament.
Group H Results
Elliot Slessor 2-2 Dean Young
Xu Si 3-1 Jackson Page
Xu Si 2-2 Dean Young
Elliot Slessor 3-1 Jackson Page
Jackson Page 2-2 Dean Young
Elliot Slessor 3-1 Xu Si
Group H Table
1. Elliot Slessor – 7 points
2. Xu Si – 4 points
3. Dean Young – 3 points
4. Jackson Page – 1 point
Slessor joins Lei Peifan, David Gilbert, and Noppon Saengkham in Winners’ Group 1 with Zhang slotting into Winners’ Group 2 alongside Hossein Vafaei, Jak Jones, and Dylan Emery.
So after more than three weeks of action at the Mattioli Arena, the 2026/27 snooker season’s first ranking event champion will finally be crowned.
Only four players from the world’s top 16 participated in the tournament and none of them managed to make it this far.
Among the eight competitors who have made it to Stage Three, four already understand what it takes to lift a ranking trophy – albeit each only once.
Gilbert is the only former winner of this event still in the lineup, the Angry Farmer looking to match his success in the competition from five years ago.
Vafaei is a former Shoot Out champion while Zhang and Lei have respective victories in the bank from the International Championship and the Scottish Open.
The other four contenders are bidding to land silverware on the main tour for the first time.
Saengkham was a runner-up to Gary Wilson at the 2023 Scottish Open, while Jones was a surprise finalist at the World Snooker Championship a few months later.
Slessor has been knocking on the door of a proper breakthrough for a few seasons, rising to a career-high of 19 in the world rankings through several runs to the semi-finals of events.
Emery is the obvious outlier, with the 25 year-old from Wales having never before even been ranked inside the top 64.
With such a short and unpredictable format, however, it’s anyone’s guess who will actually be the last person standing.
The online bookmakers slightly favour Zhang, who has become the most fancied in the outright betting market with odds of about 7/2, and there are plenty of free bet offers available for snooker fans who want to back one of the remaining players.
The initial goal on Wednesday is simple though – win your group to reach the final, which will be played across a sprint of best-of-five frames.
There is a champion’s cheque worth £20,000 up for grabs, although various other bonuses throughout each group stage mean that the overall winner will take home a purse of £33,000.
It’s not an enormous amount, especially in comparison to most of the other tournaments on the calendar.
But it will be a pressure-easing way to start a new campaign, and there will be a considerable boost in confidence ahead of more considerable tests on the schedule to come.
Live coverage is available for Ireland and UK viewers on the Matchroom Multi Sport and Matchroom Pool YouTube channels.
Stage Three
| Group | Date | Players |
|---|---|---|
| WG1 | July 15 | Lei Peifan, Noppon Saengkham, David Gilbert, Elliot Slessor |
| WG2 | July 15 | Hossein Vafaei, Dylan Emery, Jak Jones, Zhang Anda |
Featured photo credit: WST
I am finding it very difficult to find where to watch snooker on tv. Impossible actually!! Any information PLEASE.
As you may or may not know, I started to follow snooker in earnest starting with the 2025 Shanghai Masters. I have learned plenty from the likes of David Caulfield and Jay Brannon even if at times I could not buy what they were telling me. I was wrong. In the last three days watching the Champions League snooker I had to rethink my entire premise of what I actually admire the most about snooker. As a newcomer I limited myself to only respecting aggressive potters, but wow, I have crossed over closer towards the purists.
Where am I going with this? If you watched the last three days of snooker, you have seen plenty of heavy breaks and scoring. Regardless of the player, the successive potting rate was much higher than their normal success rate while their safety game, getting out of snookers remained and spatial awareness remained on par as usual. The broadcasters mentioned the forgiveness of the pockets numerous times but I never heard them call a shot missable once.
I am in no way saying this to discredit these professional players, I am saying that I have never seen circumstances where the tables in all the other tournaments where it was so easy to make a pot. Rather than the stiff pockets kicking out a ball, they reacted to allow the momentum of the ball to continue falling into the pocket. The cushions obvious where soft. Likewise, I have never seen so many consecutive pockets where the ball entered the pocket without as much as a brush against a pocket cushion, they were obviously wider than usual.
It is true I at times feel cheated when an aggressive potter takes a chance at a pot to only end up giving the more defensive player a chance to make an easy pot. But what sport does not need both plenty of skill and a pinch of luck to have a good outcome. Plenty of pots like the last three days because of the table set up is not what snooker is about. If you look at the results, no one with this mickey mouse set up could win three consecutive matches in the 6 groups in the last three days. Many group winners only won 1 of three matches. The table condition and likely the frames per match were not conducive to finding the most successive player.
Because of the table I do not know who I want to win, but I will be watching.
And doing my research on David Gilbert, he was called the angry farmer because his dad was a farmer and Matt Selt called him angry. There is calling the kettle black.
The English people involved with today’s action will probably be hoping it’s a day of all out attack to be finished before the second World Cup semi.
Jak Jones picks up his first ever WST Tour ranking event silver coming from behind to a crumbling David Gilbert. In so many ways Jak Jones had karma on his side in this tournament along with a spectacular four cushion snooker escape and multiple big breaks. Congratulations to the 32 year old Welshman who became a professional snooker player at the tender age of 16 after winning the Junior European Snooker Championships in Malta.