Snooker 2026-27 Season So Far: Six Ranking Events, Five Winners

Wu Yize beat Yuan Sijun 10–5 in Shenzhen on Sunday, and that closes the first block of the season. Six ranking events have now been played. They have gone to five different players, and the only one to win twice is a man who had never won a ranking title before July.

There is a break of almost two weeks before the Northern Ireland Open starts in Belfast, so it is a good moment to look at who has won, who hasn't, and who has quietly won more matches than anyone.

Six events, five names

• Championship League, Leicester, 22 June to 15 July: Jak Jones beat David Gilbert 3–2 in the final.
• China Open, Taiyuan: Mark Selby beat Noppon Saengkham 10–6.
• Wuhan Open: Chang Bingyu beat Zhao Xintong 10–7 for his first ranking title and £175,000. Chang was banned for two years in the 2023 match-fixing case, a ban that ran until December 2024.
• British Open, Cheltenham: Jones beat Selby 10–6.
• English Open, Brentwood: Ali Carter, 47, beat Mark Williams 9–6.
• Shenzhen Open: Wu beat Yuan 10–5. It was Yuan's first ranking final.

The Shanghai Masters in late July went to Judd Trump, but it is an invitation event and carries no ranking points.

Jak Jones, twice

Jones is best known for the 2024 World Championship final, where Kyren Wilson beat him 18–14. Until this summer that was the only ranking final he had played. He has now won two in eight weeks.

The British Open title was the harder one. On the way to the final he beat Chang, the Wuhan champion, and Trump 6–3 in the semi-finals. The final was level at 5–5 before Jones won five of the last six frames, the twelfth of them on the black. The £100,000 cheque took him back up to 22nd in the world.

The man who keeps winning matches

The most useful number of the season so far belongs to Selby, and it is not his title.

Across the five ranking events since August (China, Wuhan, Cheltenham, Brentwood and Shenzhen), Selby has played 23 matches and won 19. Among the players we track, nobody else has won more than 14. Trump has 14, Shaun Murphy 11, Wu 10 and Zhao 9. Selby won the China Open dropping only 13 frames in five matches, reached the British Open final, and made the quarter-finals in Wuhan and Shenzhen.

What stands out is how many of those wins came down to the last frame. Seven of his 23 matches went to a decider, and he won six of them. Three came in a row in the early rounds at Cheltenham, all 4–3, against David Lilley, Lei Peifan and Jackson Page. Two more followed at Brentwood, against Ricky Walden and Zhang Anda, before Kyren Wilson finally beat him 4–3 in the last 16.

Best-of-seven matches are where good players go out early, because one bad session is enough. Selby has kept getting through them. It is also a warning: without those six deciders, his season would look a lot more like everyone else's.

The top of the rankings is still waiting

Zhao is the world number one. He reached the Wuhan final and the British Open quarter-finals, where Trump beat him 5–1. In the other three ranking events since August he lost his first match each time: 6–5 to Zhang Anda in the China Open, 4–2 to Oliver Lines in the English Open and 5–4 to Scott Donaldson in Shenzhen. He has played two deciding frames since August and lost both.

Trump's ranking title is still missing too. We wrote before Shenzhen that he kept losing to players on a run. Shenzhen added another example: Wu beat him 6–1 in the semi-finals and went on to win. In three of the five ranking events since August, the player who knocked Trump out lifted the trophy.

Our Form Rating, which scores every frame against the strength of the opponent over the last twelve months, still has Trump first, Zhao second and Selby third. The two players at the top have no ranking title between them this season. Four of the six titles went to players outside our top five. Most early rounds are best of seven or nine, and those formats leave room for the player having the week of his career.

What comes next

The Northern Ireland Open runs from 18 to 25 October at the Waterfront Hall. The International Championship in Nanjing follows from 31 October to 7 November, and the UK Championship in York starts on 28 November. Jones is the only player who can win a third ranking title of the season in Belfast. Trump and Zhao are still trying to win their first.