Reigning champion Jack Lisowski began his defence of the Northern Ireland Open with a 4-1 victory over Huang Jiahao in Belfast, but Mark Selby made a surprise first-round exit.<\/p>\n
Lisowski, 35, won his first ranking title at the tournament last year and raced into a three-frame lead over his Chinese opponent at the Waterfront Hall.<\/p>\n
The Englishman allowed Jiahao to cut the deficit to 3-1 but would clinch the fifth frame on the black to advance.<\/p>\n
He will now face Scotland’s Anthony McGill, who enjoyed a 4-1 victory of his own over Stephen Maguire, in round two. <\/p>\n
While Lisowski ensured safe passage into the second round, there were surprises on the opening day of the tournament with Selby and Xiao Guodong both beaten in round one. <\/p>\n
Four-time world champion Selby was hoping to become the first player to win the quartet of Home Nations tournaments, but was beaten 4-2 by Louis Heathcote. <\/p>\n
The world number five, who has already won the China Open this year, led 2-0 but dropped four straight frames to exit.<\/p>\n
Xiao Guodong, meanwhile, lost a final-frame decider to England’s Sam Craigie and Cork’s Aaron Hill was also beaten in the first round with a 4-2 defeat by Thailand’s Thepchaiya Un-Nooh.<\/p>\n
Former world champions Neil Robertson and Shaun Murphy suffered first-round losses against Ricky Walden and Liam Davies respectively in Sunday’s evening session.<\/p>\n
The experienced Walden was a 4-1 winner against Robertson, and 20-year-old Welsh prospect Davies had a 4-2 victory over Murphy that he rounded off with a 104 break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reigning champion Jack Lisowski began his defence of the Northern Ireland Open with a 4-1 victory over Huang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-807322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gb","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/807323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}