Jack Lisowski breaks his duck to qualify for home British Open

The reigning Northern Ireland Open champion defeated Scott Donaldson, 4-1, in a qualifying match on Thursday at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester to advance to the last 64 which will be staged at The Centaur in Cheltenham at the start of September.

The British Open uses a flat 128-player format - meaning all entrants start in the opening round, regardless of world ranking - although the top 16 seeds have all had their initial assignments held over to the main venue.

Since its return to the professional snooker circuit in 2021, the British Open - a ranking event with a total prize fund of over half-a-million pounds - has used a 'FA Cup-style' random draw for each round, a throwback to what the competition used to employ many years ago.

As the world number 17, Lisowski is the highest ranked cueist at this week's qualifiers, and he took control early on against Donaldson, making breaks of 69 and 79 in going 2-0 up.

An effort of 71 aided him to 3-0, and although Donaldson avoided the whitewash and got on the board with frame four (54 break), Lisowski secured progression in the next.

Qualification for Lisowski will be a relief after a difficult start to the fledgling 2026/27 World Snooker Tour season that had seen him fail to qualify for any of the three opening Chinese events.

The 35-year-old was defeated 6-1 by Chang Bingyu in the final qualifying round of the China Open, and a few days later he was whitewashed 5-0 by Yao Pengcheng in the Wuhan Open preliminaries.

Only the day before his win over Donaldson, Lisowski was eliminated from the new Shenzhen Open having suffered a 5-1 loss to Zak Surety.

Earlier this month, 'Jackpot' did win a Championship League Snooker group before going out in the second phase, but has lost ground early on in his bid to return to the world's top 16.

A place back inside's the world's elite bracket - Lisowski has been rated as high as 10th in the global standings before - would mean him avoiding such qualifying excursions like this week's trip to Leicester.

The draw for the second round of the British Open has yet to be released, but before appearing in front of a home crowd in Cheltenham, Lisowski will now make his way to the Far East for next week's Shanghai Masters invitational where several of the world's star names will perform for the first time this term.

Due to world number 12 Mark Allen electing not to enter, Lisowski was first in line to receive a call-up and he will take his place in the 24-player, £825,000 snooker extravaganza. Lisowski meets Zhang Anda in the first round, with the winner of that tie going through to the last 16 to face 2012 champion John Higgins.