WC2002 Day 4 Round-Up

Judgment Day has ended in Cardiff and the field has been halved to 64 going into the knockout phase of the tournament starting tomorrow. The players knew every frame of every match counted today, as most groups were tight and few places in the last 64 had been decided before today's play.

The big shock of the day is that the 2000 world champion Fong-pang Chao is packing his bags after being beaten 5-3 by German Christian Reimering, who finished top of group 3. Radislaw Babica, Paul Potier and Fabio Petroni finished in the top half of group 3 to follow Reimering into the next round.

Unsurprising group-toppers were defending world champion Mika Immonen, Filipinos Efren Reyes and Django Bustamante, and American heavyweights Johnny Archer and Earl Strickland, while pre-tournament betting favoutire the 'Prince of Pool' Cory Deuel is also through, as are Kunihiko Takahashi, Oliver Ortmann, Steve Davis, Neils Feijen and Ralf Souquet.

It wasn't a good day on the whole for the Welsh contingent. Snooker genius Mark Williams, though not a Pool genius yet, scraped through in fourth place by notching up a win against Australian Snooker player Johl Younger. Crowd favourite and local boy Rob McKenna lost 5-2 to Japan's no.1 Shintaro Sugaya and 5-3 to Englishman Imran Majid. McKenna could still then have gone through but for Gary Ponting's 5-1 destruction of Aruba's Ditto Acosta, which shuffled the table positions around sufficiently to leave the Welsh spectators disappointed and with only one representative through to the last 64, which is one more than last year at least.

The English fared comparatively better, with 6 players including Ponting making it through. The Knightrider Steve Knight scraped through by a single rack lost, while Daryl Peach redeemed a bad week by beating Irishman John Wims and American Shannon 'The Cannon' Daulton to keep his hopes alive. Kevin Smith failed to make the grade this time round, as did Anthony Ginn, who failed to produce the goods this year after reaching the last 16 last year, Snooker player Paul Hunter and the 8 ball player Darren Appleton.

You can see the final group tables here and the match results here