No fewer than 11 players can still win the £150,000 BetVictor Series bonus, with just one counting event remaining.
The series started back in October and has covered seven events already, but remarkably there are still a wide range of players in contention to top the BetVictor Series Rankings and take the massive bonus. The eighth and last event is the BetVictor Gibraltar Open, which runs from March 24 to 26.
Trump won the BetVictor bonus in 2020 and 2021, so this year he could take his total earnings from that bonus alone to £450,000
Judd Trump, who has won the bonus in each of the last two seasons, could have taken a significant lead had he won the BetVictor Welsh Open, but he lost 9-5 to Joe Perry in the final. Perry’s £70,000 top prize has vaulted him into contention, moving him up 73 places to tenth.
John Higgins and Mark Allen are tied at the top with £98,000. If they both reach the same stage in Gibraltar and are not overtaken, then Higgins would win the bonus as he is ahead on countback. They are pursued by:
Fan Zhengyi £93,500
Luca Brecel £93,500
Neil Robertson £92,000
Ronnie O’Sullivan £90,000
Zhao Xintong £87,000
Hossein Vafaei £83,000
Joe Perry £77,000
Judd Trump £71,500
Ricky Walden £57,000
With a £50,000 top prize available in Gibraltar, all 11 players can still win the bonus.*
BetVictor Gibraltar Open prize money
Winner: £50,000
Runner-up: £20,000
Semi-finals: £6,000
Quarter-finals: £5,000
Last 16: £4,000
Last 32: £3,000
Last 64: £2,000
High break: £5,000
Total: £251,000
On the one-year ranking list, Perry storms up from 72nd to 18th, bringing himself into contention to qualify for the Cazoo Tour Championship (March 28 to April 3), with only the top eight to go through to Llandudno for the third and last event in the 2021/22 Cazoo Series. The two remaining counting events are this week’s Nirvana Turkish Masters and BetVictor Gibraltar Open.
Walden: Chasing on several fronts
Trump earned £30,000 as runner-up in Wales and he’s up from 17th to 13th. In eighth place is Vafaei with £124,500, closely followed by Walden with £122,000 and Yan with £118,000 so this week’s event in Turkey is vital to those players.
As it stands there are three players inside the top eight of the one-year list who are outside the top eight of the official two-year list: Brecel, Allen and Vafaei.
Trump remains third on the two-year list behind Mark Selby and O’Sullivan, while Perry is up 19 spots to 23rd. The two-year rankings will now be used to create the seeding list for the BetVictor Gibraltar Open, with the draw and format to be announced in due course.
There are just three counting events to go in the Race to the Crucible and 17th-placed Walden continues to gradually close the gap on 16th-placed Yan, but still trails by to £22,000. If Walden could qualify for the Cazoo Tour Championship then that would come with a guarantee of £20,000 which counts towards the rankings.
Tickets for all of these events are on sale now – for details click here.
*Yan Bingtao would have been with a chance of the bonus with £78,000 but has decided not to enter the event.