Snooker star Zhao Xintong is set to return to the sport after being banned for 20 months over a match-fixing scandal. The 27-year-old was tipped for a promising career after winning the 2021 UK Championship, rising to world number nine at one point and threatening the top stars in snooker.
But he became one of ten players suspended in 2023 after being part of the scandal. He did not personally fix a match but accepted charges of betting on a game he knew had been thrown. Fellow Chinese player Yan Bingtao was handed a much tougher punishment of seven-and-a-half years.
Xintong, who previously claimed he made “a little mistake”, could now make his long-awaited return at the World Championship after serving his ban – should he make the qualifiers – according to the legendary Stephen Hendry.
Hendry told the Snooker Club podcast: “Apparently he’s in the top five with the betting for the whole thing. If he gets through then it’ll be really interesting to see how he does. There’s a whole load you could say that you don’t want in the first round of the World Championship.
“It’s different from the late 80s and early 90s where you could forget the first two rounds because you’d breeze through it. But there will be one or two who will be good draws. Everyone else will be tough.”
Reflecting on his unsavoury saga, Xintong said he was eager to make amends and get back to playing regular snooker – insisting the sport meant a lot to him. He told the BBC: “Two years ago I made a little mistake, now I’ve come back. I know how important snooker is to me and now I just want to come back to the snooker table.”
Xintong has previously received huge acclaim from some of the sport’s greatest players. Seven-time world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan heaped praise on the player in 2022 after watching him win the German Masters.
He said: “The last time I was this excited about a player was when I saw Stephen Hendry play when I was only about nine years old, and I was thinking ‘Who is this fella?’.
“I remember watching Stephen play in some festival in Hastings and you knew he was special. And for me Zhao is the only one since that made me think he could be something special.
“He is super-good now, but could be an unplayable great if he were to brush up on certain things. And that is up to him, does he want to be open to that, and do the work.
“Because Zhao can be as good as he wants to be, he has got the game in his hands. As he develops he will handle the pressure situations even better than now.”
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