The UK Championship is undoubtedly the biggest tournament of the 2019/20 season, and will commence on Tuesday. Judd Trump and Ronnie O’Sullivan are strong favorites to win the ranking events.

The Barbican Centre in the United Kingdom is set to host the tournament for the 15th time.

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the reigning champion of the elite snooker tournament. When O’Sullivan won the UK Championship again, he became only the third player in the event’s history to successfully defend the UK title, after he defeated Northern Ireland’s Mark Allen in the final.

The last person to have won the UK Championship three times consecutively was snooker legend, Stephen Hendry. If O’Sullivan were to win the trophy in the UK, it would also see him break the Scot’s all-time ranking event record of 36, which he has held for a long time now.

O’Sullivan would have broken that record this year, but he narrowly missed out on realising the feat in the recent Northern Ireland Open as Judd Trump snatched away his chances of winning a 36th ranking event in Belfast for a second successive season.

Both Judd Trump and Ronnie O’Sullivan will be the two strong favourites in York too and, as the two top seeds, have been separated on two opposite sides of the UK Championship draw, so they could possibly meet in the final again.

Both players are very highly favoured and have been predicted to advance very far in the tournament. The both of them will be expected to come out victorious from their opening matches in the first round.

O’Sullivan will face Irish amateur Ross Bulman and Judd Trump will clash with a relatively unknown Moroccan snooker player called Amine Amiri.

Neither Bulman or Amiri have the skill, nor experience on the Main Tour so O’Sullivan and Trump will be mainky fancied to progress to the next round easily.

Other matches will see three-time winner, John Higgins start his UK Championship campaign against Peter Lines while Selby comes up against Andy Hicks.