{"id":413844,"date":"2026-04-23T18:03:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/413844\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T18:03:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:03:08","slug":"2026-world-snooker-championship-hossein-vafaei-first-qualifier-to-win-at-crucible-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/413844\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 World Snooker Championship: Hossein Vafaei first qualifier to win at Crucible this year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Iran&#8217;s Hossein Vafaei became the first qualifier to beat a seeded player at the 2026 World Championship as he defeated China&#8217;s Si Jiahui 10-3 to set up a tie with world number one Judd Trump.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Si, a semi-finalist in 2023, held a 3-1 lead, but 31-year-old Vafaei, ranked 32nd in the world, won nine frames in a row, thanks to breaks of 81, 61, 60, 105, 53, 78 and 68.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Over the last three frames of the first session on Wednesday and the four frames on Thursday, 15th seed Si only scored a combined 64 points as Vafaei impressed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He will play 2019 winner Trump next and said: &#8220;He is one of my friends and a nice guy on and off the table. He is the world number one so it&#8217;s the best match.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;m getting a lot of support from back home and they would love me to do very good in this tournament. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Si is one of the best players China has so a tough opponent for me, I respect his game and I&#8217;m one of his fans, he is such a great player.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iran&#8217;s Hossein Vafaei became the first qualifier to beat a seeded player at the 2026 World Championship as&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-413844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413844","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=413844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}