Zhao Xintong Results 2026: World No. 1, Out in His First Match Twice

Zhao Xintong will walk into the Waterfront Hall next Tuesday as the world number one. He took the top spot from Judd Trump after the Wuhan Open in August, a tournament he didn't even win. His last two ranking events both ended in his first match: 4–2 to Oliver Lines at the English Open, then 5–4 to Scott Donaldson in Shenzhen.

His opener in Belfast is against Gao Yang on 20 October, best of 7. The shape of his season is unusual for a player at the top of the list.

The 2026-27 results so far

Leaving out the Championship League groups, Zhao has played six events this season:

• Shanghai Masters: beat Ding Junhui 6–2 and Neil Robertson 6–0, then lost the semi-final 10–8 to Kyren Wilson.
• China Open: lost his first match, 6–5 to Zhang Anda.
• Wuhan Open: five straight wins, including 5–0 over Gao Yang and 5–1 over Robertson, then lost the final 10–7 to Chang Bingyu.
• British Open: four wins without dropping more than two frames, then a 5–1 quarter-final defeat to Trump.
• English Open: lost his first match, 4–2 to Lines.
• Shenzhen Open: lost his first match, 5–4 to Donaldson.

That adds up to 11 wins and 6 defeats, 81 frames won and 54 lost, and 21 centuries. Good numbers. But three of six events ended at the first hurdle.

Last season, across twenty events, that happened to him twice. One of the two was Belfast, where Jordan Brown beat him 4–0 in the last 64. Zhao scored 52 points in the whole match.

The deciders have turned

The bigger change is in close matches. In 2025-26 Zhao reached a deciding frame 14 times in ranking and invitational events and won 11 of them. That was the season he won the World Grand Prix, the Players Championship and the Tour Championship, and a lot of it was built on 6–5 and 5–4 finishes: 5–4 against Mark Selby and Chris Wakelin on the way to the Grand Prix title, 6–5 against Elliot Slessor and Mark Allen at the Players Championship.

This season he has been in two deciders and lost both.

The China Open defeat is the one that stings. Zhao won the first three frames against Zhang Anda and was still 4–2 up. Zhang made an 88, an 81 and a 134 on his way to leading 5–4. Zhao forced the decider, and lost it 71–64.

The English Open loss was different. Zhao made two centuries against Lines, a 102 and a 100, and they were the only frames he won. Lines took the other four with breaks of 59, 71 and 84. When Zhao got in he scored heavily. He just didn't get in often enough.

None of this means he is playing badly. He is still scoring: every one of his 17 matches this season outside the Championship League included at least one break of 50 or more from him, and he has more centuries than wins. What the numbers point to is fine margins going the other way, at the start of events and in final frames, which is exactly where best-of-7 snooker is decided. We wrote about why short matches produce upsets in our best-of-7 vs best-of-19 piece.

What the ratings say

The official ranking is built on ranking-event prize money from the previous two years, which is why two early exits haven't moved him from the top. Century Radar's Form Rating looks only at the last twelve months and reacts faster. It had Zhao first on 1 September. The British Open quarter-final against Trump dropped him to second, and after the two first-match defeats since, his rating is another 53 points lower. He now sits 40 points behind Trump, with Selby four points behind him.

So the slip is real, and the rating has caught it before the official list has. But it comes from a handful of frames: one decider in Taiyuan, one in Shenzhen, and a match against Lines in which he made two centuries and still lost. The scoring is still there. What he has lost is the close ones.

Zhao Xintong's next match: Gao Yang in Belfast

Zhao's next match is against Gao Yang, estimated for 15:00 UK time on Tuesday 20 October. They have met twice since June 2025. Zhao won 5–0 at the Wuhan Open in August and 3–1 in a Championship League group in July.

Our match page makes Zhao an 81% favourite. That number comes with a warning: we hold only part of Gao Yang's record, and across every match of best-of-7 or longer in our back-test the favourite won 60.8% of the time. Gao's recent results against tracked players are mixed: a 5–1 win over Bai Yulu in Wuhan, defeats to Ali Carter, Wu Yize and Zhao.

The rest of the draw is on the Northern Ireland Open 2026 hub, and our preview covers the seeds and storylines. If Zhao wants to keep the number one spot through the autumn, the first job is to get through a Tuesday afternoon best of 7 at a venue where he scored 52 points last year.