Snooker legends Jimmy White and Ken Doherty to clash on pro tour over 34 years on from first meeting

Carrying a prize fund in excess of £2.3 million - with a champion’s purse of £500,000 - the second edition of snooker’s ‘fourth major’ is set to take place at Green Halls, Prince Abdullah AlFaisal Sports City between August 8-16.

A total of 144 players - a field comprising of professional players, Q-School top-ups and 16 local amateur wildcards - are to feature in the competition, and all of them will play at the main venue in the Middle East.

The lucrative event uses the same tiered draw system as deployed in the UK and World Championships, with players entering the tournament depending on their world ranking position. The top 16 seeds all go straight through to the last 32 (round five) where they will await the 16 players who emerge from the opening four rounds.

Unsurprisingly, there is scheduled to be a star-studded line-up in Jeddah, with all but one of the world’s current top 16 in the draw. That player is China’s Xiao Guodong, who along with compatriot Bai Yulu have elected to play at the 2025 World Games on home soil in Chengdu instead.

The only round of fixtures we are currently certain of is in round one where there is a nostalgic tie between Jimmy White and Ken Doherty - two icons who continue to ply their trade on snooker’s top tier, as well as working within the media.

With a combined age of 118 years, White and Doherty will clash in a best-of-seven frames encounter with the winner to progress to round two and a meeting with teenager Artemijs Zizins from Latvia. In order to triumph at the event and lift the trophy, both White and Doherty would need to win nine consecutive matches at Green Halls.

Despite having faced each other on the seniors tour in recent years, this will be the first time that White and Doherty have duelled in a full professional event since the qualifying rounds for the 2010 World Snooker Championship. On that occasion, in the last 64, Irishman Doherty came out on top as a 10-3 victor.

White and Doherty's first dance together on the top tier came at the 1991 Mercantile Credit Classic in Bournemouth where White won 5-3 in the quarter-finals - over 34-and-a-half years ago.

The Londoner went on to win the title, defeating then world champion and world number one Stephen Hendry 10-4 in the final.

In terms of their overall head-to-head record within the professional ranks, the scoreline is fairly even. They’ve met in two professional finals - White ousted a 10-9 win at the 1992 Grand Prix ranking event, and Doherty scored a comfortable 10-2 success at the 1998 Premier League invitational.

They met at the 1994 World Championship where White recorded a 13-10 victory in the last eight. However, they have played at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield since where White staged a remarkable recovery act in the final of the 2020 World Seniors Championship when he came from 4-0 down to win 5-4.

At the start of this new season, 63-year-old White registered a plethora of breaks in defeating Anthony McGill 5-2 to qualify for the main venue stages of the Wuhan Open, before losing 4-2 to teenager Liam Davies in qualifying for the British Open.

Doherty - who is on the second year of a two-year invitational tour card - is looking for his first win this season having lost to Ben Woollaston (5-1) and Haris Tahir (4-3) in his respective qualifiers.

Other standout games in the first round include recent 'Player of the Month' Marco Fu taking on Chang Bingyu - a cueist who Ronnie O'Sullivan was very impressed with a few years ago - and 14-year-old Michal Szubarcyzk meeting Q School invite Ryan Davies.

Multiple-time winners of the world women's snooker championship, Reanne Evans and Ng On Yee will aim to build on recent positive results on the World Snooker Tour when they play Kreishh Gurbaxani and Hatem Yassen, respectively.