Joe O'Connor. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images)

Joe And Stuart Clash In Welsh Open Snooker Final Bid

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Joe O’Connor was a 3,000-1 outsider when the ManBetX Welsh Open began, but he has stunned the pundits with a strong run to the semi-finals.

The 23-year-old from Leicester has just about doubled the prize money he has earned this season simply by making the last four, which guarantees him £20,000.

There are even greater prizes ahead if he can progress again with the champion collecting £70,000.

Kyren Wilson, Ding Junhui and four-times World Champion John Higgins have all fallen under O’Connor’s spell this week and crashed out of the Welsh Open at Cardiff’s Motorpoint Arena.

The former World junior pool champion defeated John Higgins, last year’s winner, 5-3 in the quarter-finals with a break of 131 in the final frame.

Stuart Bingham, an experienced 42-year-old professional from Basildon in Essex, is 1-5 on to beat 7-2 chance Joe O’Connor in the best-of-11-frames semi-final clash, but it’s far from a foregone conclusion.

O’Connor, who was a whopping 3,000-1 for the title earlier this week, defeated quarter-final foe John Higgins, last year’s Cardiff title winner, 5-3 with a brilliant run of 131 in the final frame.

Snooker professional rookie O’Connor is working to take in all the experience he can during his first season at this level, saying: “I enter anything and everything to gain experience and progress.

“I started playing pool when I was about 11 and was pretty successful at it, but there was no money in it so I transferred to snooker. I still played pool until I was 18, so snooker wasn’t a full-time thing to start with.

“Some of the other players started playing snooker at about eight, nine or 10-years-old. I’m a few years behind, but I seem to have caught a few of them up.”

O’Connor was an amateur when he was first invited to play in top ranking events, saying: “I had a period of about two years where I was invited to pretty much every tournament, which looking back has helped me because as soon as I turned pro, it was nothing new and I could just get on with playing snooker.”

O’Connor’s performances in Q School, an amateur competition that serves as the qualification process to the professional game, were the reason he was receiving invitations.

“If I was to sum up the transition from amateur snooker to professional snooker in one word, it would be consistency,” he said. “Even though a lot of the top amateurs can do what the pros can do, it’s just about doing it on a regular basis. When they’re on form, 99 per cent of the professionals can go various amounts of frames without missing.

“I’m practising six days a week. The more hours I put in, I believe the consistency will come.”

Bingham, who won 5-2 against China’s Zhao Xintong in the last eight, and O’Connor join Neil Robertson and Iran’s Hossein Vafaei in the semi-finals.

They are the four survivors from an original 128-player draw in a tournament which offers a £366,000 total prize fund.

The last four include two former Welsh Open champions, a maiden Home Nationals semi-finalist in Hossein and O’Connor, a maiden ranking semi-finalist.

ManBetX Welsh Open Snooker Championship quarter-final results:

Stuart Bingham 5, Zhao Xintong 2

John Higgins 3, Joe O’Connor 5

Hossein Vafaei 5, Scott Donaldson 1

Neil Robertson 5, Kurt Maflin 4

Welsh Open semi-finals today

1pm Joe O’Connor v Stuart Bingham

7pm Hossein Vafaei v Neil Robertson 

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