Zhao Xintong secured his first tournament win since becoming world champion by beating Neil Robertson 5-2 in the Riyadh Season Snooker Championship.<\/p>\n
Zhao, who defeated Mark Williams in the Crucible final in May to become the first Chinese player to win the world title, produced back-to-back breaks of 131 and 134 to open up a 4-1 lead against world number three Robertson.<\/p>\n
The Australian responded with a run of 91 to cut the deficit to 4-2, but Zhao sealed victory and the \u00a3250,000 (\u20ac284k) winner’s prize with a 57 in the next frame.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old Chinese appears to have rediscovered his World Championship-winning form in Riyadh, having seen off Shaun Murphy in the last eight before beating Judd Trump in a thrilling semi-final.<\/p>\n
Zhao said after his win: “I feel so happy, it\u2019s amazing to win this title. I was nervous, but I just tried to concentrate on the table. It\u2019s my first time in Riyadh so I will have a lot of good memories here and I look forward to coming back.<\/p>\n
“Lots of people from China were here, they gave me huge support and that was so important to me. My only target now is just to keep getting better.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zhao Xintong secured his first tournament win since becoming world champion by beating Neil Robertson 5-2 in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-153113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}