Who is Jak Jones? The Welsh qualifier making history at the World Snooker Championship

It took Jak Jones time to reach snooker’s biggest stage but the Welshman has made his presence felt since stepping into the Crucible. Nine times the 30-year-old tried and failed to make it through qualifying for the World Snooker Championship before finally breaking through last year — but Jones has swiftly established himself as a Sheffield specialist.

He began the 2023 edition having reached a ranking event quarter-final just twice in a career that began in 2010, a semi-final at the now-defunct Gibraltar Open the height of his achievements. For a player who seemed to possess a complete game and ideal temperament, it felt strange that Jones had yet to really make his mark.

But the longer matches that the World Championship provides suit a composed character nicknamed ‘The Silent Assassin’. Wins over Ali Carter and Neil Robertson took him into the last eight on Crucible debut before falling 13-10 to Mark Allen in a tight quarter-final, a run that marked the Cwmbran-born potter as one to watch for the future.

The deep run did not immediately provide a springboard into the 2023/24 season. In seven events this campaign, Jones had been beyond the second round only once — on home soil at the Welsh Open — and the momentum gained by his last-eight appearance seemed to have been lost.

Yet he has once again saved his best snooker for when it matters most. If an encounter with snooker’s form player in the quarter-finals felt a likely endpoint to another encouraging run, then a win over Judd Trump to reach the single-table set-up was evidence of Jones’ big-match bottle.

“I’ve not really thought anything of it,” Jones said after that last-eight victory. “I’m just playing snooker like I do every day in the club, obviously it’s slightly different out there, I’m just trying not to think of it... just play snooker.”

Only twice before has a qualifier won the World Championship at the Crucible, Terry Griffiths’s feat in 1979 repeated by a young Shaun Murphy in 2005. Jones will bid to join the exclusive group this weekend, having got into snooker after a chance encounter with 1994 World Championship semi-finalist Darren Morgan on holiday in Corfu.

Spotting his natural potting talent, his fellow Welshman encouraged him to join a club once he’d returned home. Morgan has tipped his former protege to build further from here.

“I just think it’s going to be Jak’s year, there’s no one there playing any better than him and that’s for sure,” Morgan told BBC Radio Wales. “As long as he can hold himself together, I think he’ll be fine.

“He is a very cool customer, he’s very quiet and quite reserved. He’s got married in the last 12-14 months and he goes about his business right, he’s a work horse. The boy practices and practices, that’s never changed from when he was with me at my club to where he is now. You only get out what you put in, if you keep knocking on that door, one day that door will open.”