EPTC3: And then there were four…

Click here for the updated provisional seedings…

And then there were four. Liang Wenbo, Ken Doherty, Andrew Higginson and Marcus Campbell are the last men standing in Germany as true to form, the two players that I tipped this morning (Mark Selby and Barry Hawkins), crashed to quarter-final defeats…

Surprisingly there hasn’t been a player so far this season to win more than one of these PTC events and that is a statistic that will continue into next week following Mark Selby’s 4-2 defeat to Liang Wenbo at the quarter-final stage today. Having had a slow start to the season which saw him lose the top 16 place that he had worked so hard to achieve, Liang is now stringing some results together again and it will be interesting to see if he can go all the way today and add a PTC title to his CV. Either way, now back up to number 18 in the provisional seedings, I don’t think that it will be too long until he is back inside that all important top 16 bracket. Next up for him is Andrew Higginson who himself is slowly homing in on a place inside the top 16. If he can just win a few more matches in front of the TV cameras then it could well happen…

The other semi-final meanwhile sees 1997 world champion Ken Doherty up against veteran Scot Marcus Campbell who in the quarter-finals was able to inflict a third defeat on Judd Trump in the space of 12 months. He definitely seems to have a hold over his young opponent at the moment. Ken meanwhile saw off Barry Hawkins, an impressive win for Ken who is enjoying his best weekend of the season to date.