Northern Ireland Open 2025 – all you need to know
The 10th edition of the Northern Ireland Open will be staged at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast from 19-26 October.
The seventh ranking event of the season will feature most of the top names in the sport as they battle it out for the Alex Higgins Trophy and the £100,000 first prize.
The leading contenders will include defending champion Kyren Wilson, who defeated four-time champion Judd Trump 9-3 in the final 12 months ago.
The six ranking events played so far this season have resulted in six different winners so predicting the winner this week is a difficult task.
The tournament will be the second of the Home Nations series after Mark Allen won the English Open in Brentwood in September.
Here is all you need to know about the tournament.
Is Ronnie O'Sullivan playing?
Ronnie O'Sullivan did not enter this year's tournament after also sitting out the 2023 and 2024 versions of the event.
The seven-time world champion previously contested three successive Northern Ireland Open finals, losing to Judd Trump on each occasion between 2018 and 2020.
As has been his practice in recent years, O'Sullivan is being selective in the tournaments he is participating in this season.
He did not enter the Championship League or the English Open and withdrew from the Wuhan Open and the British Open.
O'Sullivan did take part in the Xi'an Grand Prix, reaching the quarter-finals, and is set to compete in the UK Championship later in the year.
The 49-year-old lost 10-9 to Neil Robertson in the final of the Saudi Arabia Masters in August, having battled back from 7-2 down to lead the final 9-8 against the Australian in the decider.
O'Sullivan made the 16th and 17th maximum 147 breaks of his career in defeating Chris Wakelin in his semi-final in Jeddah.
The other three players from the world's top 16 who are missing from the NI Open line-up are recently crowned Xi'an Grand Prix winner Mark Williams and Chinese pair Ding Junhui and Xiao Guodong, who retained his Wuhan Open title in August.
Who are the leading contenders?
Defending champion Wilson has struggled for form at recent events but has already tasted success this season by winning the Shanghai Masters, while Robertson secured the lucrative Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters crown to help him top World Snooker's one-year ranking list.
Robertson is bidding to clinch a complete set of Home Nations titles, having previously won the Scottish Open in 2017, the Welsh Open in 2019 and the English Open in 2021 and 2024.
Likewise, Mark Selby is chasing a Home Nations clean sweep as his success in the Welsh Open in February was added to English Open wins in 2019 and 2022 and back-to-back Scottish Open victories in 2019 and 2020.
Northern Ireland's Allen is aiming to make up the 'grand slam' of Home Nations crowns this season, his win in the English Open last month, adding to two successes in the Northern Ireland Open and a Scottish Open triumph.
Allen thrilled his home crowd with successive wins in Belfast in 2021 and 2022, the first of those two wins coming after a memorable 9-8 success over John Higgins in the final.
World number one Judd Trump has not won a trophy since triumphing in the UK Championship in December last year and is yet to reach a ranking event quarter-final this season.
Trump is the most successful player in the history of the NI Open, having added a victory in 2023 to his hat-trick of wins from 2018 to 2020.
The world number one faces a particularly testing first-round match against recent British Open finalist Anthony McGill.
Shaun Murphy is a player in form, having collected the British Open title in September and reached the final of the Xi'an Grand Prix to move up to ninth in the world rankings. He also won The Masters in London in January.
Other leading challengers include four-time world champion and world-ranked six John Higgins and reigning world champion Zhao Xintong.
Tournament format and a brief history
A total of 64 players will compete, including seeds and those who came through the qualifiers.
All matches from round one to round three are best of seven frames, the quarter-finals are best of nine, the semi-finals best of 11 and the final best of 17.
The Waterfront Hall has hosted seven of the previous nine Northern Ireland Opens, the only exceptions being the inaugural running at the Titanic Exhibition Centre and the 2020 version, which was staged under controlled conditions at the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wilson became the first non left-hander to win the event 12 months ago, following victories for Judd Trump (4), Mark Allen (2), Mark King and Mark Williams.
Four players have compiled maximum 147 breaks in the tournament so far – John Higgins in 2016, Stuart Bingham in 2019, Trump in 2020 and Allen in 2021.
