Zhao Xintong is set to play his first professional snooker event since returning from his match-fixing ban by competing at this month’s UK Championship.
The high-profile scandal engulfed snooker in early 2023 as 10 Chinese players were charged with varying degrees of match fixing and ultimately Liang Wenbo and Li Hang were banned from the sport for life. Former world No 11 Liang’s behaviour was identified as “particularly disgraceful” by the WPBSA Disciplinary Commission that carried out the hearing.
The investigation primarily related to matches played in the British Open, Welsh Open, Scottish Open, Northern Ireland Open, European Masters and Turkish Masters in 2022.
The two highest-profile players caught up in the scandal were 2021 Masters champion Yan Bingtao, who is currently serving a five-year ban until December 2027, and Zhao, who stunningly won the UK Championship in 2021 and was ranked ninth in the world when his suspension began.
Zhao did not fix any matches himself but was found guilty of being party to another player fixing two matches and betting on snooker matches himself.
He saw a 30-month suspension reduced to 20 months following early admissions and his guilty plea but that expired in September and he has been playing on the amateur Q Tour since then.
He won a Q Tour Europe event in Sweden last month, making a maximum 147 break along the way, and the snooker authorities confirmed on Tuesday that all winners of Q Tour events so far this season will get a place in UK Championship qualifying.
That means the 27-year-old Zhaohas a chance to qualify for snooker’s second-biggest event, which he spectacularly won three years ago – beating the likes of John Higgins, Jack Lisowski and Barry Hawkins before downing future world champion Luca Brecel 10-5 in the final.
That victory catapulted him into snooker’s upper echelons and backed up the victory by claiming glory at the 2022 German Masters a few months later to cement himself in the world’s top 16 until his career ground to a halt with the match-fixing suspension.
Qualifying for the 2024 UK Championship runs from 16-21 November in Leicester and the qualifiers are tiered – meaning amateurs such as Zhao will come in at the opening round and need to win four matches to reach the main stage of the event
The world’s top 16 enter the UK Championship fray at York’s Barbican Theatre, joined by the 16 qualifiers, with the main stage runnning from 23 November to 1 December.
